Our Year in Reading 2019
The astonishing translation by Emily Wilson Last month I posted about my Ursula LeGuin reading project for 2019; here’s the complete list of everything my husband Dan and I read over the past year. We read just two books in common this year: Lauren ...
My Year of Ursula Le Guin
Some good reading This year, for the first time ever, I read a lot of books by a single author. I decided to try this at the end of 2018, inspired in part by my husband Dan, who often reads multiple books by one person, and also by my friend Christian ...
Excess is the New Dreary: Restoration Hardware’s Fall 2012 “Source Book”
Pretentious much? Last Friday afternoon, I opened my front door to collect my mail and discovered that the postman had left one piece of mail on the ledge next to our mailbox. The piece was so large it did not fit in the mailbox. “What the hell?” I ...
Quarter-Century
August 15, 1987 My husband Dan and I were married 25 years ago today. In honor of this milestone, I share the following: A few weeks ago, an alarm went off in our house in the middle of the night. Dan got up to investigate. He returned a minute lat ...
On Writing Slowly
Slow writer I’m an incredibly slow writer. How slow? Well, there was five minutes of keyboard silence between the completion of that first sentence (“I’m an incredibly slow writer.”) and the arrival of the second one (“How slow?”). And that’s fast for ...
What We Read in 2011
For the second year in a row, my husband and I have kept lists of all the books we read during the year. Last year we had very few books in common, but this year we had more overlap, including David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Jen ...
In Praise of Persimmons
ripe Fuyu persimmons Ah, persimmon season: my favorite time of year to be in Davis, California, and to live in my house. Nine years ago, when we left San Francisco and bought this place, I disliked almost everything about it (especially that it was ...
Occupy Downton Abbey
Last week I had the worst cold I’ve had in years, and spent several days curled up in bed with my laptop, streaming BBC miniseries and period films from Netflix. I started with “Mrs. Brown,” the 1997 BBC Scotland production starring Judi Dench as Queen ...
On Being Mistaken for the Other Japanese-American Writer in Town: Not the Rant You’re Expecting
The other day I ran into an acquaintance in town. We don’t know each other well and hadn’t seen each other in several months, so I reminded her of my name. “Yes, of course!” she said. “Didn’t your book just come out?” I laughed. “No, not yet.” And t ...
On Pride, Identity, and Watching the Women’s World Cup
My friends are often surprised to learn that I love watching sports on television. I can’t blame them. I’m pretty aggressively nonathletic. My idea of exercise is biking to the Farmer’s Market. My notion of a competitive good time is kicking your butt in ...