What’s Braedan Houtman Reading?

My reading is never habitual. I have moments of insatiability and others of fasting. Working at a bookshop last year, reading and completing were separate entities. I read widely: the first half of Millhauser’s Disruptions, fragments of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and nearly all of Tokarczuk’s Flights—the last of which I loved until I lost it during my move to New York. But I finished almost nothing (one being On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche—which, as it turns out, I read twice). The good news is that as I’ve started my MFA, I’ve begun gorging again. I just finished Celia Paul’s memoir, Self-Portrait, and was moved by her relationship with her mother and sisters—strangely fascinated by her love for Lucien Freud. On the art theme, I read an old Canadian Art interview the other night with my favourite painter, From the Archives: A Visit with Alex Colville; it made me long for a house by the sea in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Ethan Canin’s short story, The Year of Getting to Know Us, was just recommended by a friend. I find it brilliant. And because I’m currently interning at New Directions, I’ve found myself picking books off their shelf to devour: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, and A Simple Story by Leila Guerriero. All enlightening.