The Spine

In Shelf Awareness, a reviewer of Mattilda Berstein Sycamore's latest book "Sketchstasy" wrote, “If you've heard her read, you know Sycamore's voice is one in a zillion. She’s at her very best in Sketchtasy.” Click Play to (literally) hear for yourself. Largely self-educated and widely read, Mattilda is wise and whimsical. It's a magnetic combination. Her reading story takes an important turn when she moves to San Francisco at 19 and meets a vibrant queer community that loves to read as much as she does.

"I really think that being obsessed with books and reading and other people's stories has had a huge impact on pretty much every aspect of my life," says journalist and host of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman. In this episode of The Spine, hear how she got away with checking out more than the 10 books allowed to children with library cards, how reading bell hooks shaped her understanding of feminism, and which books she did NOT like (hint: anything with petticoats and bonnets). It's a thoughtful, insightful conversation.

https://thespineshow.com/ann-friedman

A mixed-race child of an immigrant, Iain Haley Pollock began reading books his father read as a child, a tradition he carries on with his own kids. Two of the most influential books have been poetry collections, where he was able to discover multiple poets at once. Never underestimate the anthology! His conversation with the host, Gail Marie, ends with the story of how and why he read Malcolm X's autobiography...as a fourth grader.

SHOW NOTES: https://thespineshow.com/iain-haley-pollock/

Though a citizen of the United States and Austria, author John Wray currently lives in Mexico City. And that is where I spoke with him, via Skype, to talk about his reading life. As a child, he was read to in German. As an adult, he often prefers to read books he finds left outside for anyone to take. And though he prefers fiction, when he's working on a book, he turns to biographies.

https://thespineshow.com/john-wray/

A designer by schooling and trade, Jez Burrows is also a writer who enjoys having fun with words. The books he likes best do, too. In one, letters start disappearing from a plaque on a statue in town, and the residents must do without them, one by one, until only a few are left. Which means the writer does without them as well. In another, originally written in French, the letter E is missing. And guess what? It's missing in the English translation, too (how did they do that?!). You have probably never heard of some of the books discussed in this episode — so, get your to-read list out.

Visit the show notes page on The Spine's website to see a list of all of the books and writers Jez mentions during his interview: https://thespineshow.com/jez-burrows/

Critic, poet, and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib remembers "sneak reading" Thomas Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" as a freshman in high school, but he quickly grew out of hiding his passion for books. Later in high school, he read Shakespeare, and his musically inclined hear heard the meant-to-be-spoken rhythms in his plays. But music criticism is where he felt spoken to, specifically Lester Bangs, and it this writing that continues to influence his own.

Show Notes: https://thespineshow.com/episode-51-hanif-abdurraqib/

Author Paul Lisicky's interview was recorded in 2016 when The Spine was a radio program on WHUP FM out of Hillsborough, North Carolina. He's the author of five books, including “The Narrow Door,” published by Graywolf Press in 2016. A New York Times Editor’s Choice, "The Narrow Door" was named one of the most exciting books of the year by Buzzfeed and one of the best books of the year by Shelf Awareness. Paul is working on a new book, which is coming out in 2020, also from Graywolf. It’s called “Later.” Right now, he’s a Visiting Writer at UT Austin.

SHOW NOTES: https://thespineshow.com/episode-50-paul-lisicky/

A recipient of both the NYC Emerging Writer's Fellowship and an Aspen Words scholarship, author Lexi Freiman's reading life didn’t begin until she discovered plays. This makes perfect sense considering her passion for acting. In fact, Lexi worked as an actress with Australia’s national Shakespeare company before moving to New York in 2010, when she focused on writing. Her debut novel, “Inappropriation,” has been described by a reviewer as "intense, crackling, hilarious.” You could say something similar about Lexi herself.

BOOKS MENTIONED

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Transit by Rachel Cusk

WRITERS MENTIONED

Sarah Cane (playwright)

Jonathan Franzen

Michel Houellebecq

J. M. Coetzee

Nell Zink

“I was such a massive reader when I was young, and it’s the books that I read as a child that stuck with me and went on to influence me the most.”

Dana Schwartz is a correspondent at Entertainment Weekly, based in Los Angeles. She's written for The New Yorker, The Guardian, the New York Observer, Marie Claire, Glamour, Mic, GQ, VICE, and more. She is also the author of two books: a young adult novel entitled "And We're Off" and a memoir entitled "Choose Your Own Disaster.”

Head over to the Show Notes at TheSpineShow.com to see a list of all the books and writers Dana mentions during the interview, more memorable quotes, and links to her books.

QUOTES

“...I’m realizing in retrospect, a lot of my childhood was delinquent reading.”

“I was horrified of the cover [of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark] but I loved the stories, so I taped a piece of paper over the cover to continue reading it.”

“I was such a massive reader when I was young, and it’s the books that I read as a child that stuck with me and went on to influence me the most.”

“In seventh grade, I was assigned what then became, I think, my favorite book, and maybe the book I say most often when people ask about my favorite book, which is ’The Martian Chronicles’ by Ray Bradbury. It was the first book that hit me the same way ‘Ender’s Game’ did.”

“I like books that are sad and optimistic at the same time.”

“Books, I’m realizing now, are the equivalent of me scrolling through the Instagram of the girlfriend of a guy I have a crush on. It’s like, I read books to make myself sad on purpose."

Tobias Caroll is the author of the novel "Reel," which was named one of 2016's best books by Nylon, and the collection "Transitory." During the recording of this episode, Tobias was doing a short residency on Governor's Island, and he’s the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. The list of books and writers that he sent me before we spoke was long and varied — but as we spoke, a couple of themes presented themselves. See a list of all the books he mentions at thespineshow.com/shownotes.

QUOTES

"American Pastoral for me is...there are things in it that I did not realize were possible in a work of fiction, like the way it involves its narrator as a character and you're not exactly sure how much of the novel is what actually happened or the narrator's supposition of what happened.... And the fact that that is sustained while all of the other conflicts in the book are sustained, I just think is absolutely fantastic."

"[In high school], I looked at, OK, there's science fiction and there's fantasy that I read, and then there's realistic fiction. You're either realistic or you're not. That's it: No ifs, ands or buts. And so I think reading a book that's so absolutely stylized as Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was this absolutely brain exploding moment."

"There would be books that I would read that would give me the same thrill of the unknown and the mysterious [as punk and hardcore]."

After receiving a compliment about his sharp memory: "I would be hard-pressed to remember anything I learned during my sophomore year of college other than [that] I took a course on medieval Italian history and I know that there were people called Guelphs and Ghibellines, but that's pretty much it."

"I like to think that reading has made me more empathic. I'm an only child from a small family, so I think there's also that sort of means of using books as a way to discover a wider world and to help understand the lives of people whose circumstances in life are different from mine."