The books I enjoyed in my early 20s were mostly about what happens next. Drive, ambition, arrival.

The books I love now are different. They are attentive, focusing on the process, then on some kind of “they lived happily ever after”.  For example, Ferrante watches female friendship with a cirurchival precision. Ernaux walks through the labyrinths of memory in search of something buried. Maggie Nelson moves through ideas and lived experience simultaneously, showing how they shape one another. What these three female authors share is constant motion, more inwards than outwards.

I think what changes with age is the search for value, because we have more of our own life to compare books to. The writers who interest me most now are the ones who look at ordinary experience very carefully and find that it contains more than it appears to.

💭 Has your reading appetite shifted over the years, too? I’d love to know what you’re looking for in a book lately.