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18 articles
The books I planned to read are mostly forgotten. The ones I remember are the ones I read in nine-minute increments — in a Jiffy Lube lobby, at gate B12, in a parking garage at dusk. Some reading only happens while life is happening elsewhere.
I keep a running list of library holds the way other people keep a diary, and mine currently runs to forty-seven requests. The queue is a more honest self-portrait than any shelf I own, and a quiet defense of borrowing over buying.
For one month, I wrote every morning in the style of four writers I love, one week each. What I learned about influence, theft, and the voice that kept bleeding through anyway.
I spent a decade choosing novels over parties, conversations over confrontation, and the last hundred pages over almost everything else. For years I called it avoidance. I'm finally ready to argue it was something closer to training.
For years I've been returning to every book I finish exactly twenty-four months later, like clockwork nobody asked me to keep. Here's what the gap between readings has taught me about memory, change, and why a book is never the same book twice.
There's a novel I finished in March that I have never once mentioned to another living soul. No post, no recommendation, no entry in my reading log. This is an essay about why that silence felt like the most honest reading I've done in years.
Every airport bookstore purchase is really a small act of self-reinvention, bought at a markup and read for forty minutes. Here's my field guide to the books I've panic-bought at gates across America, and what each one said about who I was hoping to become by landing.
My closest friend has never finished a single thing I've written, and for years that felt like a small betrayal I couldn't name. This is what I finally understood about the people who love us in every language except our own.
An overdue book from a small Ohio library followed me through a job change, a pandemic, and an apartment with worse light. Returning it felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit.
A burst pipe, a closing sale, and a stranger named Ruth who handed me a book I'd never have picked. Everything I thought I knew about choosing what to read came apart in one soggy afternoon.
Some of the people who found me at the beginning don't read me anymore. Here's why I've stopped mourning that — and started trusting it.
Last winter, in the middle of the hardest stretch of my life, I picked up my favorite novel expecting comfort. What I found instead was a stranger wearing a familiar cover — and a record of who I used to be.
Why do the realest sentences always show up last — in the P.S., the final paragraph, the line after we thought we were done? Ali Dover digs through letters, novels, and her own wastebasket of drafts to make the case that honesty is a closing argument.
Some books change your life. Others just change your afternoon. This is a defense of the almost-great reads — the ones we abandon at page 140 and never quite forget.
I've written at a proper desk for years and can't name a single sentence from it that I love. These five rooms, though — these rooms I remember.
One paragraph a day, every day, for a full year—most of it forgettable, some of it the seed of real work. Here's what a year of micro-writing taught me about constraint, inspiration, and why the smallest habit beats the grandest plan.
Our bookshelves are supposed to be curated libraries, but mine is closer to a diary I never meant to keep. A tour through the spines reveals abandoned ambitions, one-night obsessions, and the same three books I've moved house with for twenty years without opening once.
There's a stretch of morning—somewhere between 4:45 and 7—that belongs entirely to the notebook. Here's why I gave up the keyboard for a cheap ballpoint, and what the silence taught me about getting out of my own way.