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There's a shelf at my local used bookstore labeled "Signed & Otherwise," and I go to it first. What I find in the margins — names, dates, half-erased phone numbers — is a conversation between strangers I've somehow been invited to join.
Some books I recommend to anyone. Others I keep behind an invisible rope until I have known someone for a decade. A recommendation can be a small intimacy, and these are the books I trust enough to risk it.
My best sentences have never happened at a desk. They've happened in a parked car outside a Kroger, at a laundromat in Dayton, and in a hospital waiting room with a vending machine for company. Here's my map — and an invitation to draw yours.
My book club's slowest reader finished a single book this year — and she got more out of it than any of us speed-running our Goodreads goals. A case for reading less, slower, and better.
For twelve years, my friend Dana has given me books that could not be less meant for me. I've finally realized the books were never the point.
Our book club once filled a living room. Now it fills two chairs, and honestly, I wouldn't trade it. On the strange, quiet intimacy of reading alongside a single person for ten years.
My book club meets once a year, and most of us haven't finished the book. Here's why I wouldn't trade it for a single responsible, monthly, well-attended meeting.
In January I made a beautiful list of twelve books, numbered and justified in the margins. Six months later, I've read almost none of them — and the books I chose instead have more to say about me than the plan ever did.
After a reader wrote in asking whether it's worth rereading old journals, Ali finally opened her own — two decades of them, from a college dorm in Pennsylvania to her current desk. What she found: phantom worries, resurrected dreams, and one thing she wish she could unlearn about her 24-year-old self.
We've optimized every part of creative life except the waiting. On what a slow mailbox taught me about burnout, revision, and why the best sentences need a few days to ripen.
Some of my longest friendships are with people who don't exist. On rereading, fictional intimacy, and why I've stopped apologizing for it.
For years, War and Peace sat on my shelf like a trophy I hadn't earned, while the dog-eared paperbacks that actually changed my life stayed hidden in a drawer. This is my confession—and a defense of the 'guilty pleasure' books we should all stop apologizing for.
I spent a month writing letters to people who changed my life and never mailed a single one — a childhood librarian, a professor who tore my work apart, a stranger on Amtrak. What I learned is that some conversations aren't meant to be delivered; they're meant to be finished.
Every few weeks an envelope arrives from someone I've never met, and somehow they know me better than most people at the party. Twenty years of letters from readers—what they say, why they write, and the one I've never been able to answer.