Dwight Garner
Appearances
The Daily
The Year in Books
Well, you know, it's a book of quotes and lines and aphorisms. You know, often they're philosophical or they're humorous or they're literary. And normally they're kept by one person. It's just, you know, humans have had a written language for 5,000 years.
The Daily
The Year in Books
And during most of that time, people have written down or kept in some form observations and bits of books that really appeal to them and stuck with them. And Commonplace books have been around forever. I mean, Thomas Jefferson kept a famous one, and so did Virginia Woolf, so did W.H. Auden. And it's just a place to keep track of things that meant something to you while you're reading a book.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Well, I was pretty young. I was in my teens and I was just this huge reader. And once in a while, I would come across a line that really stood out for me. And I thought, well, this is why I'm reading, you know, for a sentence like this that really shakes me awake and opens my eyes. And I would start writing them down.
The Daily
The Year in Books
And, you know, when you're a teenager, the things you think are cool and interesting, you know, life is like a box of chocolates. You know, how true are not the things you think are cool and interesting when you're 59 as I am now. And so my taste has grown over time. But I started doing this when I was pretty young. And I just, you know, some people collect stamps.
The Daily
The Year in Books
I collect sentences and observations and I find that I'm always sort of moved by them.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Oh, God. I would say probably 1,000, you know, at minimum, because... Wait, 1,000?
The Daily
The Year in Books
I'm reading the book and I'm highlighting. And then when I'm done with the book, I slap it down next to my laptop and I flip through it page by page and I type out the best quotes that I've marked in there. I find the act of typing something, typing a line, typing an observation, typing a great word sort of fixes it in my mind a bit. I'm more likely to remember it.
The Daily
The Year in Books
One of my favorite books this year was Sheila Hedy's Alphabetical Diaries. You know, Hedy is a really talented young Canadian novelist, and she had a nifty idea. She printed her journals, her diaries, in alphabetical order, so the sentences all just run from A to Z. And she wrote... No one at this point in history knows how to live. So we read biographies and memoirs hoping to get clues.
The Daily
The Year in Books
And I love that line, not because it's funny, but because it's the reason I think I started reading. Once upon a time in America, before Netflix, before the internet, fiction was where we went to get news about how other people lived. Food-wise, sex-wise, relationships, marriages, that's where news was delivered. And it's not so true anymore, but for me it still is. And
The Daily
The Year in Books
I look for novels to sort of understand why we're here, A, and B, to understand how can I live better? I mean, just, you know, what lessons do you have, Sheila, for me? And she tends to have a lot. The title of her 2010 novel was great. It was How Should a Person Be? And in a way, I think every novel asks that. And the fact that she was great enough to title a novel that is really terrific.
The Daily
The Year in Books
You know, I really am. I think that a lot of people read and think about what the world means and why we're here and how we can, you know, experience life a little more fully. And that means the small things and the large things. And that's sort of what I look for and the kind of things that I put into my commonplace book.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Let me see. One book I read this year that's really remained with me is Salman Rushdie's memoir, Knife. It's about how he was stabbed on stage in upstate New York in 2022. And, you know, it's a very dark and moving book. And it goes through enormous personal pain, physical pain. And yet the book is weirdly very funny. As he was being stabbed, he found himself thinking, oh, no, my Ralph Lauren suit.
The Daily
The Year in Books
You know, he laughs about the fact that his surgeon's name was James Beard, you know, like the chef and cookbook writer. He writes, dear reader, never get a catheter. He wrote that his attacker looked like Novik Djokovic, the tennis player. He wrote that on the upside, he lost 55 pounds and his snoring and asthma improved.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Yes, it was a sign of his sanity. You know, you felt, Salman, you're still with us, you know. And he, you know, sometimes in his work, his humor fails him a bit, at least in recent years. So it was great to see him in his full glory in this recent memoir.
The Daily
The Year in Books
This is from Honor Levy's book, My First Book. He was giving knight errant, organ meat eater, byronic hero, haplogroup R1B. She was giving damsel in distress, pill popper pixie dream girl, haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Well, we're talking about two young people who are texting and using emojis. And in reality, what these characters are, they're just kids. And this is the dance of their courtship in a way online, their mini courtship. It's a Book largely about, you know, kids being online, young people being online, and what that feels like now to be sort of almost permanently online.
The Daily
The Year in Books
And a lot of the sentences, she's so up to date on the language and the lingo that half the time you barely understand what she's saying. I had to run to the dictionary, or at least to Google, several times to sort of understand what she was saying.
The Daily
The Year in Books
And the more you learn, the more you like it, because she just has a way, you feel like you're reading Anne Beatty about hippies in the early 70s, reading Honor Levy on these young kids online now.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Yeah, you know, it's just, and we're all there, right? We all are online like half the time. And yet you find a writer who can really describe it, who can really get you there. And that's what writing does for us. It's the thing where things you felt, but never had anyone just nail it down, just like to get it right. And you say, holy cow, that's good writing.