three books. one dog. the same loop, twice a day.
location: arizona. still. a different corner of it, with a temporary visitor and a departure date that keeps moving.
conditions: warm. dry. the kind of april that makes staying feel reasonable. energy level: cautiously optimistic. coffee’s gone cold again.
i used to read eighty, ninety, a hundred books a year. this was not a performance. it was just what happened when i sat down somewhere quiet — i read, i finished, i started another. it felt like breathing.
the past three years i’ve finished maybe ten. started more. lost most of them in the first few pages, which is a specific kind of failure — not dramatic, just quiet. the book is fine. i’m just not there yet. i close it and tell myself i’ll come back.
i have not always come back.
so three books at once right now feels significant, even if it doesn’t look it from the outside. it looks like a bench at the dog park and a stack of things i keep picking up. from the inside it feels like something loosening.
lab girl by hope jahren, almost finished.1 the language of trees by katie holten, somewhere in the middle.2 dopamine nation by anna lembke, just cracked.3
i did not plan this combination. it happened the way reading always happens when it’s actually working. one thing leads to another and suddenly you’re holding three books worth of thoughts about what living things reach for and why, sitting on a bench watching sally sprint in increasingly meaningless circles while april does whatever it wants outside.
sally does not have this problem. she knows exactly what she’s reaching for. it’s usually another smell, toy, dog, or the general concept of motion for its own sake. she has not read any of these books. i don’t think she needs to.
jahren writes about plants the way i didn’t know anyone was allowed to write about science. like devotion is the whole methodology, like the work is something you do because the alternative is a version of yourself you can’t live inside.1 she found the thing. the specific, consuming thing. she went all the way in.
i find this both inspiring and a little destabilizing to read on a bench in the arizona sun while a dog does laps and i try to remember what it felt like to finish a hundred books in a year. not a crisis. just a question that doesn’t have the decency to wait for a better moment.
holten’s book is quieter, stranger.2 trees communicating through root systems and fungal networks, a language that operates on timescales we can’t pay attention to long enough to hear. the idea that the forest is always in conversation and we just keep walking through it talking about ourselves.
then lembke, who would like to inform you that your brain is a very sophisticated feedback loop optimized for wanting things, which explains a lot about everything, including probably the reading slump.3
so: obsessive devotion. deep slow signals we keep missing. the neuroscience of craving.
i did not plan this syllabus. i’m taking notes anyway.
we haven’t been hiking. we’re still south. different location, now in arizona, and a temporary visitor. plans that keep shifting the way spring plans do when diesel prices have opinions. idaho is on the horizon. maybe may 1st. maybe later. the desert keeps making a case for staying.
in the meantime: morning and evening dog park loops. sally in the field burning the energy she was apparently issued in surplus, me on the bench with a book and coffee made by the love of my life. it is not a trail. it is also not nothing.
there is something in watching a dog run for the pure uncomplicated fact of running. no destination. no elevation tracked. just the field and the particular joy of being exactly where she is. she is not in a reading slump. she is not wondering what she’s reaching for. she has already found it, which is this, right now, and she is doing it at full speed.
jahren would probably have something to say about that kind of focus. or maybe she’d just watch too.
i’ll finish lab girl in the next few days. i already know i’ll miss it the way you miss books that made you stop and stare at nothing for a minute while you thought about them. that’s the test, for me. this one passes.
next up on the stack: several books i started and abandoned in the last three years, waiting with what i choose to read as patience rather than accusation. we’ll see.
sally is ready to go. she does this thing where she comes and stands very close to tell me she’s done, which is not subtle but is effective.
closing the book. going home. same loop tomorrow.
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lab girl — hope jahren — borrow from a library or buy a copy ↩ ↩2
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the language of trees — katie holten — borrow from a library or buy a copy ↩ ↩2
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dopamine nation — anna lembke — borrow from a library or buy a copy ↩ ↩2
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