Midsummer Mixtapes
A Commonplace Post + Reading Records + An Actual Mixtape
My notebook is a mess. Blue cover smudged and stained. Pages of book titles, author names, quotations, observations, bits of literary history, characters, questions, new words and definitions, ribbons of overheard conversation, nascent poems, story and essay ideas. Drifting chunks of text linked inelegantly by arrows. One long page taken up with a list of writers and their respective years of birth and death, beginning with Cervantes and going along chronologically. The rare “book review” (“splendidly imagined but corny”) and vague images that have yet to find a place to rest (“adults upstairs listening to Sade”).
I used to keep pristine handwritten notes for the sake of posterity and aesthetics. I wanted everything to look right. For me, for myself. If I made errors, I’d rip the page clean out and start over. All of my notebooks were once subject to this scrupulosity. For nearly a decade I taught yoga to teenagers and adults, and throughout those years I wrote out every one of my sequences by hand, in Sanskrit and English. I prepared thoroughly for each class and practiced each planned sequence multiple times, and if through this process I found that the sequence needed to change, I would gladly excise the page from my teaching journal and write it fresh, leaving no trace of the first draft.
Misspellings, strikethroughs, a crooked line, a sentence revised, subtractions, additions: these markings represent a process animated through the movements of a living mind and a changing body. When I see archival documents belonging to great writers, every scribble looks like pure art to me. Because human imperfection is interesting, and because I don’t want to live like machines in a lubricated world of simulations and surfaces. Then I look at my own jots, and I itch to erase and perfect.
I admire rigor, precision, refinement; these are useful and, when applied wisely, in service of beauty. But these are points of arrival, not departure. I wonder about the impulse to expunge that which is unruly, and the twin desire to put forth a polished work with no evidence of its evolution, if only for an audience of one.
I’m still easily seduced by the illusion of control, but I do not in this season of my life possess the wherewithal to be unforgivingly precious. What matters is that my brain and my left hand manage to coordinate effort for long enough that the immaterial thought makes it onto the page, where it becomes a whisper more than nothing.
Over the last seven months or so I have copied down many lines and passages that I find remarkable for one reason or another; I’d like to share some of those transcriptions with you here. Perhaps this gathering of prose will pique your curiosity in the books from which they derive or the authors through whom they were borne. Below the excerpts are reading lists of past, present, and future, as well as a playlist I assembled for a recent road trip.
As always, please feel welcome to write back and tell me what you’ve been reading, listening to, watching, mulling over.
“These days, my two youngest grandchildren have a habit of biting their mothers, and in some instances, other children. My daughter and my daughter-in-law texted me photos of the bite marks, some taken by themselves and some by concerned daycare workers. My daughters are worried about the biting, but also worried because babies who bite are not allowed to attend daycare. And if that were to happen, my daughters would lose their fucking minds.
When I saw the photos, I texted back that it was good to know my grandkids were biting other kids, not themselves. I’ve received no response.” (page unknown)
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace
“My head was full of a very loud clanging. Nothing expert, nothing trained or intellectual. Just a shit-detector going off, that was all. The alarm bells of a woman who had been in the world for more than sixty years, knowing men, sometimes hearing them say true things, sometimes being told lies.” (page unknown)
Helen Garner, This House of Grief
“You don’t need money when you’re rich. You don’t need anything when you’re rich. It’s a question of shame, and we never feel shame. Poor people are right to hate us.” p. 66
Constance Debre, Playboy
“Charles caught himself laughing; but the memory of his wife, returning to him suddenly, sobered him. They brought in the coffee; he stopped thinking about her.” p. 19
“Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love.” p. 37
“[None] of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.” p. 167
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“It’s a bad day for me. I’m feeling fat and lonely, and trapped in my lousy life.” p. 31
“Our exchange was not exactly conversation. Carried on at a high level of speed and noise, it consisted of a series of rapid-motion confrontations. Assertion, denial, defense was the way we understood talking. And the more urgent the facedown—that is, the more volatile and explosive—the more stimulated and reassured, I think, each of us was. This appetite we had for arguing the point right down to the ground was a measure of how fundamental a weapon we both conceived the articulating intelligence to be. If we could each persuade the other to see the truth as we saw it, the world would somehow turn on its axis and all that thwarted us would be emptied out into harmless space.” p. 168
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments
“Mine is a large, a generous nature, and it’s therefore not like me to notice how base practically everyone is.” p. 71
Iris Owens, After Claude
“The water we use for washing and clearing is managed by the municipal government. They send over one large bucket each day and that’s it. So when we bathe, we can’t wash our clothes. If we wash our clothes, then we can’t do the dishes or mop the floor. To manage all these things, you have to keep careful track of how much water is left in the bucket on the roof. The bucket of water on the roof is very salty and can’t be drunk. You have to buy drinking water separately from the store. Water is very precious around here.” p. 111
Sanmao, Stories of the Sahara
“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” p. 8
“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God.” p. 24
“As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.” p. 49
“[For] here he was starting to go to a party, at his age, with the belief upon him that he was about to have an experience.” p. 163
“But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know everything, he said; at least he did.” p. 193
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“The more conscious I was of the good and of all this ‘beautiful and lofty,’ the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it.” p. 7
“I’m bored, and I constantly do nothing.” p. 41
“He knew me by heart. It infuriated me that he knew me by heart.” p. 65
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
“The cover story of all time, that’s what money is. The excuse of excuses no one will question because they so much need to use it themselves.” p. 12
Heather Lewis, Notice
“I was not bowing to you, I was bowing to all human suffering.” p. 337
“Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone…They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good.” p. 576
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Once after seeing an emotional French movie, Sundays and Cybèle, the kind only a young person can love, Jim and I were so excited we ran and ran through the nearby empty midnight streets. We crossed over to the East River by an overpass on the Upper East Side and kept running. I was so full of nameless emotion; that must have been the happiest moment of my life. An ecstasy of just feeling young and alive that I shared with Jim. Of course at the time someone doesn’t think, I’m young and alive. I thought I would be this happy and energetic forever, that only morally compromised people got old.” (page unknown)
Edmund White, The Loves of My Life
“I said I was sure that through careful listening you could solve any problem that might arise. If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything.” (page unknown)
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book II)
“He could never hear enough about the inadequacy of people who weren’t him. And as with his boasting about his past, these things didn’t need to have actually happened for him to enjoy them. The fact that he enjoyed them somehow brought them into being, with each innocuous piece of news you shared with him somehow always ending up as a perfect illustration of some risible misstep.” p. 22
Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms
“Donald has gray hair, the color of faded newspapers. You’d never know he had been a blond as a child; you’d never have known he had been a child. His eyes show leadership, are fibrous as salad olives. Green.” p. 110
“I know the way Beal’s beard spreads over the sheet. He don’t never cut it. It’s like one of those dinky houseplants you get with good intentions, but it takes over, needs a bigger and bigger pot every time you look. The beard fills our bed at night, lies between us, and sometimes I feel it try to grip me.” p. 215
Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine
“A tall young man came by. He was carrying a tiny baby in a sling against his chest. The mother walked behind, smooth-faced and long-haired, holding by the hand a fat-nappied toddler. But the man was the one in love with the baby. His head was bowed so he could gaze into its face. His whole being was adoring it.” p. 149
Helen Garner, “Civilisation and Its Discontents,” Stories
“Sometimes I think that compassion is not innate to the heart, that it has to enter us with each childhood scrape and hurt, like tiny bacteria.” p. 48
“Lenny was a homely man with a salesman’s hyperbolic patter and a cult leader’s unyielding stare.” p. 89
Jill Ciment, Half a Life
“And even the charmed days of plundering its pixelled vistas have passed. That wild landscape has already been disinherited by swaths of the public, weary of its antagonism to the mysteries of life. It’s been decided. It’s better not to know everything, to reduce real knowledge to the dumb sourcing and recitation of facts. I agree with that. Now people wax of it like long-sober addicts, like veterans of unfashionable wars, whose valiance has lapsed, whose achievements lose purchase with each passing day like coral sublimated by invisible acids.” p. 37
Jack Paradise, Greenhouse
“We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.” p. 158
“The last line about passing the torch of life is stolen from the poet Lucretius. He has been dead for years but he is still alive.” p. 166
Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of Place
Other Books Read (January-July 2026)
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Things by Georges Perec
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene
Muscle Man by Jordan Castro
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
The Guest by Emma Cline
Clutch by Emily Nemens
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Perfection by Vincenzo Lautronico
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash
Strangers by Belle Burden
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Still Talking by Lore Segal
A Hymn to Life by Gisele Pelicot
Flesh by David Szalay
Euphoria by Lily King
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Vigil by George Saunders
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
Notes to John by Joan Didion
Firstborn by Lauren Christensen
Consent by Jill Ciment
In Progress
Wifey by Judy Blume
Playworld by Adam Ross
The Body in Question by Jill Ciment
Practicing Dying by Charlotte Northall
Coming Up (on shuffle)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer
So Far Gone by Jess Walter
Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt
The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette
Country People by Daniel Mason
Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Élisabeth by Éric Rohmer
The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle
Pilgrimage (Volume I) by Dorothy Richardson
Dog Days by Emily LaBarge
The Hill by Harriet Clark
Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Fights! by Scott McClanahan
The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan
Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann
Snow Man by Carolyn Chute
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Michael Sorkin
The School on Heart’s Content Road by Carolyn Chute
Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer
Dopamine Kids by Michaeleen Ducloff
Famesick by Lena Dunham
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
