I sometimes think we read to keep from being alone, or to keep our fears and memories at bay. Someone said the person who reads can live a thousand lives, the person who doesn’t can only live one.

Like many of the people reading this, I’ve always been a voracious reader, but my reading has been disrupted by the difficulties and distractions of recent years, from divorce to the collapse of publishing to the rise of digital and social media, which distract me constantly, and often, pointlessly and disturbingly.

It seems my life used to be structured differently and more simply. Work was over by dusk, and after dinner was a time to sit down with a book and read it. Struggle as I might, I have found too many intrusions and distractions. To save money and read in the dark, and when I travel,  I got a Kindle, and have read even less. I don’t precisely know why. This year, as part of our re-juvenation of the Christmas holiday idea, I have started reading again. I bought some books at Battenkill and got one or two online.

I bought a reading light and can  read in the dark again. I am determined this week to carve out time late in the day – on these short and dark days – and in the evening. I am off to a rocky start, but beginning to catch fire. These books above are the ones I’ve chosen, and I mean to get my mind back, my time, and my imagination. I do want to live more lives than my own. I do want to stretch my mind and soak up words and ideas.

So I’m doing a book report this week, this is the time, between holidays, when things slow down, to get back into the groove I love. Books matter to me, I’ve written 28 of them.

– I’ve already finished M Train, by the writer, performance artist and musician Patti Smith. It is a gorgeously written book, a mystical and magical memoir that takes us through Smith’s life and imagination, the death of her husband, her life in New York City and elsewhere,  some of it true, some of it not. If you pay attention, you can figure out which is which.

It is the odyssey of the artist, told through travels, cafes, and the many strange haunts she has visited around the world. I loved every gorgeous word of it, I’ve never read a better book about the writer’s mind.

– I am finishing Outline by Rachel Cusk, an imaginative novel told in ten different conversations, all involving a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during a hot summer in Athens. You take something special from each conversation – with students, an old and lusting Greek bachelor, other visiting writers. We learn about life and about ourselves in each story, I took something special from every one. The writing is spare and beautiful.

So I have three more books to go before next Monday, and I may just take a whole day or two to do it (after blogging.)

–  Memory Theater, by Simon Critchley. A French philosopher finds a box of papers and discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts  predicting the deaths of various philosophers, including his own. He devotes himself to a final project before his death – the building of a structure to house his collective memories and document the remnants of his life.

Might be a novella, or an essay, science fiction, or memoir. Have to read it to find out.

–  A Manual For Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin. Selected stories.  The stories are set in the places Berlin knows and loves: Chile, Mexico, the Southwest, and California, they capture and communicate moments of grace and melancholy in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American South, the homes of the Bay Area rich, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and evil Christians.

–  In The Country, stories by Mia Alvar, what almost everyone is called a stunning literary debut giving voice to the men and women of the Filipino diaspora. Stories of exiles, emigrants, and pilgrims and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere. “A spectacular debut from a vital new talent, ” was one of the reviews that caught my eye.

This is exciting for me. Reading and writing are about me, my self. When I am not reading, I feel I have lost myself, this week I hope get a chunk of it back, and keep it.