Rebecca Solnit's Reading List Includes Poetry by Robert Hass and Warsan Shire
The New York Times featured Rebecca Solnit in its By the Book series last week. Solnit, the editors write, "keeps an eye on the 'daily eruptions of the internet': 'Like a lot of us, I’m hypervigilant about the crazy stuff going on.'" From there:
What books are on your nightstand?
There’s quite a pillar at this point, including Adrienne Rich’s “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” and Adrienne Maree Brown’s “Emergent Strategy,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s “How We Get Free,” Erika L. Sánchez’s “Lessons on Expulsion,” Philip Levine’s “One for the Rose,” Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery’s “Joyful Militancy.” Alexander Chee’s “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is probably the most recently published thing in the stack, and it’s wonderful.
What’s the last great book you read?
It’s a tossup between Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” and Roxane Gay’s “Hunger.” Though I should say that I’m often not a reader of books from one end to the other but a rover, as a result of more than half a lifetime of doing research in books, where you’re there not just for the pleasure (though there is often considerable pleasure) but to find out some particular thing. Also I get interrupted a lot, and misplace books in this house of books, and so one way or another I’m usually reading about a dozen books at a time. [...]
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Ocean Vuong, Louise Erdrich, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Elena Ferrante, Ariel Dorfman, Bill McKibben, Jamaica Kincaid, Maria Popova, Annie Dillard, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alicia Garza, Fanny Howe, Nick Flynn, Lidia Yuknavitch, Greg Sarris, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jane Mayer, Jelani Cobb, Ronan Farrow, Valeria Luiselli, Eyal Press, Gustavo Esteva, Robert Hass, Mike Davis, Rob Macfarlane, Richard Holmes, Masha Gessen, Zeynep Tufekci, Rebecca Traister, Dahlia Lithwick, Soraya Chemaly, David Corn, Garance Burke, A. C. Thompson.
Learn more at NYT.