Bedtime Stories

This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead are dead. I hear the witch’s cry break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards. Her tongue shrivels into gas…

-excerpt of “Gretel In Darkness” from The House on Marshland (1975) by Louise Glück

During the height of COVID-19 social acknowledgment, I started reading for long stretches of time to my kids at night. We worked through ebook versions of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, about the first third of Moby-Dick, and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. In case anyone is worried, the kids were asleep when I read Odysseus’ bloody homecoming.

In October 2020, after reading Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, I turned to Louise Glück’s collected poems. Even though my kids were mostly asleep, it felt weird to read some of the Glück poems to seven year olds. Reading progress stalled, but I finally finished reading this collection’s 600+ pages in March 2024.

There are books I can read in a week, and others that take me years. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, which I bought in April 2020, sits at 70%. Studs Terkel’s Working bought in July 2021 sits at 30%. And I finished Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living in April 2024, one year after starting it. For the books it takes me time to work through, it just makes more logistical sense to purchase than borrow.