Miranda July, Jamel Brinkley, and More on Their Favorite (Re)reads

The Case for Dipping Back In

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Ed Park
I am eternally dipping into the world of Charles Portis (especially The Dog of the South and True Grit), Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyöng. Sebald, too—mainly The Rings of Saturn. Lately I am losing myself again in the Samguk Yusa, a thirteenth-century collection of ancient Korean lore.

I recently reread The Catcher in the Rye and Breakfast of Champions. I didn’t fully grasp the depths of sadness in both when I encountered them as a young reader.

Amit Chadhuri
In the last fifteen years, I have been rereading two books that I first read as a teenager in English translation and then forgot about: the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. I read them not as religious texts but as the earliest examples of creative-critical writing in which thought and poetry come together, and as key works for modernism. I also go back sometimes to the Irish poet-critic Tom Paulin’s collection of critical essays, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, for its extraordinarily shrewd and enlivening readings of poets like John Clare and Elizabeth Bishop.

And I find myself returning to Paulin’s translations—more akin to Lowell’s “imitations” than to conventional translations—of mainly European poets in The Road to Inver, especially the poem “Bournemouth” by Paul Verlaine, which, in Paulin’s version, speaks to me on many levels. Tagore’s songs—so exquisite in the original Bengali—I reread each time I sing them from the Gitabitan or Collected Songs. Some of Woolf’s essays in their entirety; paragraphs from Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival—these reward repeated reading.

Jamel Brinkley
Currently, I’m in the habit of rereading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard and Angels by Denis Johnson. Transit has this tremendous scale and a startling capacity to shift between the intimate and the grand, as well as an intricate architecture. Angels doesn’t feel architectural in nearly the same way, but the strange impulses and movements of the book are really appealing. Both books offer incredible prose. Generally, the fiction I find myself rereading includes Morrison’s Sula, Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

Kevin Kwan
Evelyn Waugh’s novels are a perennial favorite of mine, especially Brideshead Revisited and Decline and Fall. To me they just get deeper and funnier with each reading, and you really get to appreciate not only what a genius satirist he was, but also how beautiful his writing was and how he evoked a sense of place. I also love re-reading Dominick Dunne’s books. I read People Like Us when it was first released in the late 1980s, and his glamorous depictions of New York society was one of the things that lured me to move there myself.

After a few years of Manhattan living and encountering the sort of people he wrote about, I came to appreciate what an astute observer of human nature he was, and rereading the book helped me see that whole crowd in a whole new light. I feel the same way about An Inconvenient Woman, which is Dunne’s ode to Los Angeles. After living in LA for a while, I reread it and began to see the city on a whole other level. It revealed so much about the overlapping circles of influence and why this town operates in the unique way that it does. I recently read it again and learned yet another fascinating facet of Hollywood history—this time about a notorious murder.

Miranda July

I read Alice Munro’s stories again and again. When you get to the phrase “too much joy” in All Fours, know that this was my acknowledgment of her gift to me as a writer and to this book specifically. She died at a wonderfully old age on  the day All Fours came out, which of course means nothing, except that I cried in a cab in NY in a moment when I had expected to only feel wonderful. Which is very Munro.

Kathryn Davis
Mostly these days all I want to do is reread. I want to get a picture of who I am now as opposed to who I was when I first read—for example—Wuthering Heights. It seems like romance was the only thing on my mind (would Cathy and Heathcliff ever “get together?”) back then, as opposed to being fascinated, more recently, with what Emily Bronte had to say about the deadly toll Romance takes on the human psyche.

Anne Carson
Homer’s Iliad.