38. Read Hard: The Believer Anthology

Ed Park and Heidi Julavits eds. (389 pp) This is an anthology of non-fiction pieces from The Beliver Magazine 2003-2009. I have had it on my shelf forever and promised myself I would finish it this month. First, I will emphasize the writing is tremendous. Some of the pieces are timeless, some of the pieces are already incredibly dated, some of the pieces had me scratching my head, asking why does this exist? One piece reminded me of that moment in Licorice Pizza when Alaina is talking to William Holden and dreamily asks, "Are these lines or is this real?" I didn't do an exhaustive deconstruction of the table of contents but it is light on gender/bipoc/lgbtq+ diversity in a way that they could never get away with today. My favorite piece by Tom Bissell is about writing instruction books and includes this line about a book that was very helpful to me when I was a new and fearful writer, "...no one who ever read Writing Down the Bones became a writer by anything but sheer accident."