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Ilana Masad's avatar

Oh Irina, thank you so much for this - I have so many thoughts. I will say that this space - Substack - reminds me of an older sort of social media, blogging (other have compared Substack to blogging plenty of times before, of course, this isn't an original take) and how this form of social media, unlike Twitter or Facebook, isn't an instant gratification machine. It is more like a conversation - sometimes a conversation a writer is having with themself, sometimes a conversation they're having with other people, but there's always a time delay, and there's usually not an endless amount to scroll through, even if someone were to go back and read each of your posts - they'd still be finite rather than this ongoing, endless scroll.

When I took a weeklong social media break a few months ago, in March, I found myself having the exact same predicament you describe about books - wanting to talk about them to someone. My partner isn't a huge novel reader, and even when he reads novels, they're for enjoyment and pleasure and not in the way that I read them - i.e. analytically when I'm a critic, or with a deep attention paid to language and pacing and character because as a writer I can't really turn those off anymore (although occasionally a book will sweep me along so fully that I will simply surrender to the story, which is always SUCH a pleasure). I relate so much also to what you wrote about having not felt the way you're describing - alone with your books and thoughts - since you were in college.

I think that reading is, in general, an emotion generating technology in some way, and as such I'm able to continue to feel my feelings via books, even when I'm incredibly numbed out or shut down because of the awful news or the endless envy of other writers and thinkers that makes me feel ashamed of myself and thus divorced from my body.

It's odd, isn't it, that professors of literature, even students of literature, don't get to talk about what they're reading all that often, isn't it? I mean, you might write for an article, or for a paper when you're a student in coursework, but the *talking* about it part... I mean, most of my close friends are readers but we're all always reading different things and recommending things to each other that, realistically, we won't read for years if ever because we all have our own endless to-read piles. And I do miss that, and social media does give me that, to an extent, but not nearly to the depth that I wish it would.

Thank you for writing this <3.

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Mia Levitin's avatar

Loved this, and always here to talk about books off of social media! xx

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