“A book always feels like a place I’ve been to”
Saturday, March 22, 2025
From Elisa Gabbert‘s book of essays “Any Person Is the Only Self,” which became a spring break find thanks to the local Venice, Fla., library:
If I remember anything about a book, I also remember where I read it—what room, what chair. I read most of Rilke’s poetry while sitting by a north-facing window in our apartment in Denver, early mornings in 2020 when I woke before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep.…
A few poems I read in the sun, on our friend’s back porch. She and her husband and kids had fled north to be with family who could help out with the childcare while they worked. Every few days, John and I would drive to their houses and sit on the porch, late summer afternoons and evenings, and share a bottle of white wine while reading, a pencil on the table between us so we could underline and asterisk our books. I didn’t used to like pencils, or writing in books, but John does, and now I do too. I like to dog-ear favorite poems in a book of poetry, a cheat code for the future, so when I pull out a book that I haven’t touched in years, it tells me where to go. Whole experience of a book, any book, is spatial. For years sometimes, I remember which side, verso or recto, my favorite parts appeared on, how deep in the book, how far down the page. A book always feels like a place I’ve been to.
Nodded along to this, feeling a kindred spirit. Gabbert even keeps annual lists recapping the books she’s read that year.