Today marks the first installment of my exclusive bi-weekly reading lists for paid subscribers. While I kicked off my blog’s revamp just before Thanksgiving, the whirlwind of the holiday season and my looming final exams (including submitting the first chapter of my honors thesis) threw me off schedule. But I’m happy to report that I’ll be writing furiously over winter break and getting back on track with my weekly posts. To make up for the delay, I’m sharing this inaugural “Reading List” with all my readers as a little gift. Enjoy!
As a reminder, “Reading List” is posted every other Thursday, in addition to my weekly Tuesday essays. This is a fun and personalized space for me to answer reader questions, share what I’ve been reading, and discuss my research process for my essays and other writing projects.
Without further ado…
Reading List - Issue 01
On Love
This week’s featured reading is the poem, “To Go to Lvov,” by Adam Zagajewski.
To go to Lvov. Which station for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew gleams on a suitcase, when express trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September or in March. But only if Lvov exists, if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just in my new passport, if lances of trees —of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud like Indians, and if streams mumble their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs in the Russian language disappear into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave without a trace, at noon, to vanish like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas of a Venetian café, the snails converse about eternity. But the cathedral rises, you remember, so straight, as straight as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket full of raspberries standing on the floor, and my desire which wasn’t born yet, only gardens and weeds and the amber of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro. There was always too much of Lvov, no one could comprehend its boroughs, hear the murmur of each stone scorched by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike that of the cathedral, the Jesuits baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew, grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills revolving by themselves, in blue teapots, in starch, which was the first formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window. The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets of nuns sailed like schooners near the theater, there was so much of the world that it had to do encores over and over, the audience was in frenzy and didn’t want to leave the house. My aunts couldn’t have known yet that I’d resurrect them, and lived so trustfully; so singly; servants, clean and ironed, ran for fresh cream, inside the houses a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski came as a visiting lecturer, one of my uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why, dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much of Lvov, it brimmed the container, it burst glasses, overflowed each pond, lake, smoked through every chimney, turned into fire, storm, laughed with lightning, grew meek, returned home, read the New Testament, slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug, there was too much of Lvov, and now there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners as always in May, without mercy, without love, ah, wait till warm June comes with soft ferns, boundless fields of summer, i.e., the reality. But scissors cut it, along the line and through the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked diligently, as in a child’s cutout along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan. Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched, cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees fell soundlessly, as in a jungle, and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death awaits you, why must every city become Jerusalem and every man a Jew, and now in a hurry just pack, always, each day, and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all it exists, quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere.
Lvov—a city the poet was born into and exiled from in the same year, 1945—is not just a backdrop. It is a being, an obsession, a sacred site of memory, rendered with such tender precision it aches. To Zagajewski, Lvov is everything: mythic, sensuous, irrepressible. “There was too much of Lvov, and now there isn’t any.”
Lvov, Lvov, Lvov—love. To go to Lvov is to go to love.
This is a poem of loss, but equally, it is a poem of reclamation. The brutal force of expulsion—the poet’s family, the city’s Polish and Jewish populations, the cutting violence of borders—is transformed in Zagajewski’s hands into a frantic, almost mystical return. But what he returns to is not the city itself (how could he?). Instead, he conjures a dreamscape where “snails converse about eternity” and “streams mumble their dark Esperanto.” In Lvov, everything is alive, distinct, singular: “a bucket full of raspberries,” “nuns that sailed like schooners,” “starch, which was the first formalist.”
The poet loves it all, fiercely and without hesitation. His determination gives us a way in. Through his words, we, too, go to Lvov.
To read it is to feel the world brim over, once again.
(I recommend reading Colm Tóibín's reflections on Adam Zagajewski's poetry, which offers an insightful lens through which to appreciate To Go to Lvov. You can read his full piece in The Guardian here.)
On Bullshit
“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.” — “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” by David Graeber for Strike Magazine (2013)
As a graduating senior, I’ve been putting off applying for jobs until January, hoping the excitement of the new year will outweigh my dread of entering the workforce. It’s not that I fear working—in fact, I’ve been eager to begin this essential contribution to society for much of my life. At 16, I started my own marketing agency. In college, I’ve held key roles in operations, sales, and marketing at various tech companies. When I moved from Boston to Palo Alto, I couldn’t wait to work 15-hour days at startups, dedicating myself to the idea of changing the world through entrepreneurship. I saw it as a direct way to solve problems. In Silicon Valley, work seems to have the same appeal as sex.
But now, I find myself questioning how much of the work we do is truly essential. I often joke with friends that it’s rare to find someone genuinely specialized in their industry these days. Many of the most sought-after roles in business are managerial and administrative—sending emails, writing documents, sending emails with those documents, and then meeting to discuss those emails and documents. If most of our time is spent on these tasks, does it matter as much what industry we’re in?
The best managers, of course, need strong instincts for their industry and a deep understanding of what their teams—whether engineers, designers, or marketers—actually do and why it matters. But at the end of the day, their specialization is in managing. And that makes me wonder: Are jobs specialized by industry or by function? If it’s the latter, what does that mean for how we relate to work?
I’m not asking this to accuse or criticize—I’m genuinely curious. If our roles are increasingly defined by function rather than the industries we inhabit, how does that shift our sense of purpose, value, or connection to the work we do?
I like the way Graeber pushes this question (you may read the full essay here):
“Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.” — “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” by David Graeber for Strike Magazine (2013)
On Bullshit, Part II
“‘This Is Happines’” chronicles the arrival of electricity in the small Irish village of Faha in 1958, an event that splits the lives of the citizens into the periods of before and after. ‘I think I understood too that I was living in the vestige of a world whose threads were all the time blowing away,’ the young narrator says of when the man came to sell them fine appliances that could be purchased in advance of electricity’s arrival, ‘and some blew away right then ….’
“Cellphones were the worst idea in the world as far as I was concerned. My stepfather had made my mother carry a pager when I was growing up, and when it beeped she had to find a pay phone and see what he wanted. What he wanted was to know where she was, a bad habit that intensified after cellphones came around.
Cellphones were a means of making a person trackable. I wasn’t falling for that. The few flip phones I’ve had in my life died ignoble, uncharged deaths in the backs of dresser drawers. For a while I had a phone the size of a credit card that served as the GPS for my car, but whoever broke into my car took the phone, so that was that. I wish the person luck trying to figure it out.
Email was a different story. Email was mail, and I loved the mail. In my youth, I ran to the box to see if there might be an envelope whose contents would change the course of my life — an acceptance letter, a love letter, a check. What was email but the chance for more friends, more love, more work? I signed up as enthusiastically as the women of Faha signed up for electric stoves, with no idea that my life was about to crack into the hemispheres of before and after.” — “The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret” by Ann Patchett for the New York Times (2024)
My thesis takes a look at how the way we communicate in the Information Age—that is, through texts, emails, calls, and feeds—is entering the way we write and read. This essay by Ann Patchett is a funny and heartfelt reflection on how one of those ways—email—has become so pervasive in our lives that it has become an accepted but increasingly difficult truth.
The truth is:
I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.
This period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is one of the worst times in email. There are so many emails—marketing of all kinds (which Graeber would argue as unnecessary perhaps in both function and form), updates and invitations, and just the usual junk that fills our inboxes, and by extension, our lives. I check my school email everyday, but I check my personal email more infrequently as a result. This is because I have actual things to respond to and add to my calendar in my school email (because those emails are community-based and usually result in real, physical action, like attending an event or turning in an assignment). During breaks, I rarely check my personal email, beyond whatever is in my primary inbox (and thus results in a notification on my phone). This puts me in the kind of situation I was in today: I deleted almost 5,000 emails. This was the accumulation of just two weeks of not checking!
In what world do 5,000 people/entities (because of course, the emails are mostly from companies) genuinely have something to say to me? In what world do I have something worthwhile to contribute back or respond with to all 5,000 of these emails?
I guess it’s this one.
On Love, Again
Because love is always a good note to end on.
I recently learned to play the card game Canasta, taught to me by my boyfriend’s family (canine members pictured above). We played in a group of five, but not in teams—each of us played for ourselves, which I’ve since learned might not be the traditional way to play. Still, it made the game more lively and competitive. The goal of Canasta is simple: collect sets of cards called melds and aim for a clean and dirty canasta—seven cards of the same rank without a wild card and then six with one. Once someone wins, you tally up the points from all the melds and announce who has the most.
Did I fall in love with this game because I won every round we played over Thanksgiving break? Perhaps. But honestly, Canasta is just fun—and a great way to spend an evening. Playing without teams turned it into a lively mix of strategy and friendly rivalry, full of laughs over lucky draws and perfectly timed plays. It’s the kind of game that keeps everyone engaged while leaving plenty of room for conversation and connection. Most of all, it draws you in completely, demanding your full attention and presence in a way that feels rare and refreshing in the otherwise busy time that is the end of the year.
If you’re looking for something new to try, I can’t recommend this game enough. You can read the instructions for playing here. And if you’re anything like my boyfriend’s family, remember: the game tends to take on a life of its own. 1. It’s easier to learn as you play, and 2. Don’t worry too much about sticking to the “official” rules. Your game, your way!
Thank you for reading my first installment of “Reading List!” I am excited to keep this series up and see how it grows and expands over time. Some weeks may have more readings—others may just stick with three or four, like today. In any case, expect something fun every other week.
Beyond this inaugural post, “Reading List” is available exclusively to paid subscribers. If you’ve enjoyed this installment, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber to support this blog. Your subscription not only helps this series grow but also offers a chance to form a more personal connection with my work and the ideas I share here.
“To Go To Lvov” is one of my favorite poems! I’m glad you’re spreading it around. And “This Is Happiness” is a gorgeous book.