Reading and sharing ideas about books has become a crucial source of connection for the 92Y community during the pandemic. The Poetry Center’s Ricardo Maldonado and Sophie Herron, who are heavily involved in programming and moderating many of our literary programs at 92U, got together with Editorial Manager Daniel Poppick to talk about the books they loved most in 2021, how the pandemic has changed their reading habits, the poetry and 92U literary seminars they’re most looking forward to in 2022, and more.
DP: The literary seminars you have been running at 92U have been phenomenally popular this year. How has the reading you’ve done alongside 92Y patrons affected you?
RM: I can’t really talk about the reading I did this year without talking about the reading I did last year. I found myself in extreme solitude during the pandemic, and finding virtual community in the literary seminars I was running for 92Y was essential. Classes taught by Colm Tóibín, a few different classes on the novels of Virginia Woolf, our ongoing series on Toni Morrison. Morrison’s Jazz has always been one of my favorites, but to read it as part of our year-long series on all of her novels and to understand it within the context her whole career, to see Jazz as an answer, or companion piece, to its predecessor Beloved, itwas revelatory for me. It helped me see the evolution of her thinking as a writer, as she moved across geographies and times to give us something like a history. And while I’m at it, Daphne A. Brooks, who lectured on Jazz, is coming back next year for a seminar on Black women in popular music. She’ll be looking into why icons like Zora Neale Hurston, Aretha Franklin and Beyonce have existed at the center and on the fringe of our own culture. I guess, I have grown to see literature and art as the crossroads where language and politics intersect. As a reader, I’m eager to spend time thinking about that in our classes. Not only in Brook’s class, but also Ruth Franklin’s class Can This Novel Be Saved?, on how we can appreciate classics like Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Heart of Darkness, while acknowledging aspects that we may find morally offensive or difficult.
SH: I read Jane Austen’s Persuasion when Rachel Cohen taught it in one of our seminars this spring, and it was amazing — to discover an Austen novel I’d never read along with everyone in the class. Similar to Ricky, the pandemic really changed the way I relate to my time, and that’s changed the way I approach reading. Being exposed to our students’ pleasure in books gave me some perspective on an attitude I didn’t realize I had. I’d internalized that you’re supposed to read books all at once: that that was somehow the virtuous approach. But I’ve discovered that I read better when I’m tackling at least four books at once. So right now I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach — a nonfiction book about how artificial intelligence develops — plus a work of classic fiction, plus some queer genre fiction, plus some contemporary poetry. And I read a little bit of each of these every day. It keeps me moving! Each book informs my reading of another.
DP: I understand needing to bounce around several books at once. My reading life feels best when I find a constellation of books that all inform one another. As part of the editorial team at 92Y I get to do these interviews with the brilliant people running our classes. When I interviewed Alex Ross in 2020 for his class on the cultural afterlife of Richard Wagner, I realized that his new book Wagnerism was going to be important for me. So that was one of the first books of 2021 that really made an impact. He analyzes music, literature, art, and history from a variety of perspectives using Wagner as the common root. It had that multiplicity of perspectives that I look for when I’m reading several books at once.
RM: Dan, I like that constellation metaphor. I think it speaks to what a lot of our students who are taking several different classes with us go through. My constellation was my apartment, my neighborhood, the train, the office — spaces that I got to experience differently by listening to audio books as I passed through them. When Colm was teaching it, I listened to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks — a novel very much informed by Mann’s family story. It was kind of beautiful to be walking around charging every moment of my life with the drama of Mann’s life.
DP: The open secret of this group is that all of us are poets. Are there books of contemporary poetry that you’ve been into, or are looking forward to? I was thinking about the mind-blowing performances that Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, and Latasha N. Nevada Diggs gave at the Tenth Muse reading that Tyehimba Jess curated in 2018 —maybe the best reading I’ve ever seen? So I read Kearney’s new book Sho, which includes poems he read that night. Which then led me to Diggs’ book TwERK. They’re so deeply in conversation with one another — going back to that idea of constellation. I’m also psyched for Jessica Laser’s Planet Drill and Solmaz Sharif’s new book Customs.
RM: I’m also really excited about Solmaz’s book. Also Erica Hunt’s newest. She’s such a force as a writer, as an administrator, as a community activist. Also Nicole Cecilia Delgado, who was our resident poet at the Y this year. While she was here she worked on putting together a collection of translations of her work, Found Objects. It’s her first in the US. And I’m actually in the process of translating a few of her poems myself.
SH: I finally read Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster — it’s been on my list since he read here in 2020 — and he recently returned to work with high school students in CALL’s Young Leaders Project. It was beautiful — a lonely, sometimes searing book. I can’t wait to read Sally Wen Mao’s latest, and Forrest Gander’s, and Marwa Helal’s, and my former poetry teacher’s — Paul Otremba — his last book before he passed away, Levee. And I’m with the team on Solmaz’s book.
RM: This is sort of a tangent, but right now I’m reading Louise Erdrich’s newest novel The Sentence, which is set in a bookstore. The main character has two piles of books, the difficult one and the easy one. I feel like we all have that. Proust was always on my difficult pile, and I remember thinking at some point that I wasn’t smart enough to read it. But Lila Azam Zanganeh’s class on Swann’s Way made me realize I was wrong. It was a huge discovery for me.
DP: I think we often assume that the easy pile is going to be more pleasurable, but in fact because the difficult pile demands something more, I find that when I’m able to immerse myself in it fully it can be more fun than something that goes down easy. That was definitely my experience of Proust. It’s like what Lila said — you simply cannot enter his world and then leave it unchanged. If only because it takes so long to read that you’ve gone through some stuff by the time you get to the other side of it. [Laughs]
SH: I actually think I disagree. There are “easy” reads that I really love, that give me the pleasure of something “difficult,” in that I might enter into arguments with them just as well, or appreciate them just as deeply.
RM: And we can bring the same attention and care to movies and TV and music and podcasts as we bring to books. Which is why at the end of the day Taylor Swift is at the top of my list. [Laughs]
SH: [Laughs] Fine, then What We Do in the Shadows is going on my list!
DP: The movie or the show?
SH: The show.
DP: Well then the movie goes on my list.
Learn more about our upcoming readings and literary seminars.