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.
My favourite read of the last few months was something contemporary: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. No book (in my recent reading history) better tackles the questions of how to have humanity, dignity, and—against all odds—how to love and be loved.
All are great. I can’t say whether they’re worth your time, but they were certainly worth mine.
Braedan Houtman’s fiction has appeared in Yolk and The New Quarterly. Though he happily calls Montreal home, he’s currently completing his MFA in New York.