Welcome to Today in Books. In this weekend edition, a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

I read about 100 books a year, and most of those are queer. Since I started my book blog The Lesbrary, queer books—especially sapphic books—have taken over my reading life, and I couldn’t be happier about it. But that means that trying to narrow down a favourites list is tricky. I keep a running list of more than 100 sapphic books I recommend, never mind other queer books.

Recently, though, a BookTuber I follow invited members to submit a list of their top 20 books of all time. Since I already put in the work of narrowing down my favourites for that, I thought I’d share them with you! Of the 20 books I submitted, 15 were queer, naturally.

Because most of my reading has been sapphic (thanks to the Lesbrary), most of these books are, too. I also know that if I was asked on a different day, this list would change dramatically.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The Life-Changing Celebrity Book Club

On the cusp of Oprah selecting her 111th book club pick, The Cut has a piece out that essentially ranks the effectiveness of a few (of the seemingly endless) celebrity book clubs. I wrote about The Cut‘s earlier piece focusing on how Marissa Stapley’s life and career were changed when Reese’s Book Club selected her book, Lucky, and Reese’s is one of the book clubs at the top of the list where there’s the greatest potential for impact. Lucky, for instance, is getting an adaptation starring Anya Taylor-Joy (Reese Witherspoon has a media company, Hello Sunshine), and honestly it sounds like a blast to be among Reese’s author cohort with gatherings and long-term support. The iconic and long-running Oprah’s Book Club is up there as well, of course, as is Read With Jenna and Good Morning America. According to the authors and industry insiders The Cut spoke to for this piece, these four get books on bestseller lists and lead to development deals.

Pay Attention to This Small Press Doing Big Things

There are few things that I love more than reading nonfiction books with incredible prose. I lose myself in underlining, annotating, and thinking through ideas in the text. Sometimes I read a sentence and just think, “Wow, what a sentence!”

Here are a few books that I just adored reading and think have some especially noteworthy prose.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman Saidiya Hartman writes incredibly beautiful prose. She tells the story of the Black women she read about who were mentioned in passing or who appeared unnamed in photographs. She investigates their lives, researches their pasts, and invites readers to bear witness to these women all too often lost from history. These women come alive on the page in such a beautiful way. This book is incredibly captivating and intricately crafted.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami Lalami’s essays examine her experience moving to the U.S. from Morocco in hopes of pursuing the American Dream. She’d heard so much about the success one could achieve in America. But when she finally arrives in America and as she follows her path to U.S. citizenship, she begins to rethink her initial assumptions. She starts to think that the American Dream is really only available for certain kinds of immigrants. Lalami is an incredible prose stylist with such sharp observational skills. I love how she crafts each essay to be its own unique gem, but they all add to the overarching theme of the collection.

In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film.

 

INTERVIEWER

Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick?

We’re now in the thick of legislative sessions for most states across the country. While there has been an astronomical rise in legislation targeting public institutions and targeting books held within them, there’s some good news. Several states have anti-book ban bills on deck as well. Some of these states pre-filed such bills, so they might sound familiar. Others are newcomers, either expanding existing legislation or building new protections for libraries with their fresh bills.

It is important to remember there are a couple of crucial pieces to these anti-book ban bills, which began in Illinois in 2023 and expanded to several other states in 2024. Some of the bills protect only public libraries, while some protect both public school libraries and public libraries. Some tie a financial incentive to freedom to read/anti-book ban policies while others increase protections of library workers against criminalization for not banning books. Other bills do both or all of the above.

We’ve seen, too, how legislators have been seeking to undermine existing anti-book ban legislation this session. Both Maryland and Minnesota do not allow books in public schools or public libraries to be pulled for political, ideological, or partisan reasons, but both states have bills this year that seek to allow bans of “sexually explicit” and “sexually inappropriate” materials. What those terms mean is left purposefully vague, hinting that this is yet another method to ban LGBTQ+ books.

If you live in any of the states with anti-book ban bills in the legislature this year, it’s crucial to have your voice heard. Make the phone calls, send the emails, and show up in person to talk to your state-level representatives about these bills and why they are crucial for protecting not only the freedom to read and institutions like public schools and libraries but also for protecting the rights, voices, and lives of marginalized people.

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Raise your hand if you’re in the mood for a little cathartic fictional violence this February! I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: 2025 is a year that has already been filled with so much rage and anxiety, not just for me but for a lot of communities everywhere. In times like these, a quick little horror read where rich people are mocked, rage is celebrated, the violence is campy and over-the-top? Yes, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Thank goodness for Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho, which came out earlier this month. Feito, your timing couldn’t possibly be better. Horror lovers everywhere, make sure you read this book!

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito Welcome to Ensor House in Victorian England. We arrive here alongside governess Winifred Notty who has come to the dreary estate to care for and tutor her two charges, Drusilla and Andrew Pounds. Immediately upon meeting the children, Winifred (or “Fred” as she is sometimes called) notices how completely unremarkable and, frankly, stupid they both are. Nevertheless, Winifred is determined to play the perfect well-behaved governess. She will do her job to the best of her abilities. And she will never, ever, ever commit any violent crimes or kill any babies. Not this time. She promises herself. But the more time she spends with the Pounds family, the more she feels the violent urges within her bubbling up to the surface again. Mr. Pounds has no misgivings about openly ogling Winifred and doesn’t mind flirting with her in full view of others. Meanwhile, Mrs. Pounds sees her husband’s behavior as a reason to punish Winifred. Between the Pounds’ horny patriarch, the constantly livid matriarch, and two infuriatingly dim children, Winifred has trouble keeping her rage in check. And, yeah…okay…maybe Winifred starts to give into some of her stranger urges. Who can blame her, really?

Even in the midst of this chaotic upheaval, collection development and readers advisory is still happening in libraries. Here are some recent lists, links, and resources to help your patrons. Reading is an escape, and we have a lot of people looking for a little escapism right about now.

New & Upcoming Titles

Ian McEwan is publishing a new book in September.

John Irving’s upcoming book, Queen Esther, returns to the setting of The Cider House Rules.

Here’s the cover reveal for Nick Medina’s upcoming horror novel The Whistler.

The top new releases for February, plus the best picks for mysteries/thrillers, romance, SFF, horror, nonfiction, queer books, and children’s books.

Superhero comics are still dominated by white creators and white characters, but there have always have been voices of color contributing to the adventures we all love so much. Black History Month is the perfect time to review the influence that Black writers, artists, and characters have had on the world of superheroes.

Note: Some of the items featured here have not aged well. I included them because they still contributed to comics history and helped make the industry what it is today, for better or for worse.

1940 – E.C. Stoner creates, draws, and writes the character Phantasmo, Master of the World for Dell Comics. He is the first Black creator known to have worked on a superhero comic and created a superhero.

1940 – Ebony White, the Spirit’s sidekick, debuts in The Spirit newspaper strip. Although rooted in racial stereotypes, Ebony is intelligent and respected by the other characters. More recent iterations have sought to portray the character in a more appropriate way.

1947 – Matt Baker, the first prominent Black artist in comics, revives the character Phantom Lady for Fox Feature Syndicate. The next year, he draws a cover so scandalously sexual that it would be held up as an example of degeneracy in comics.

I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of parcooked very flatbread. Once folded, it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cave fish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go into a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated premixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracuja drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savory flavor I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colors. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavor in the U.S., a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavored and colored spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavor and astonishing color. Dorito flavor is staggering. It can be easily decoupled from the corn medium inside my mouth. The flavor and the color of Doritos cheers me up no end and the lurid smut on my fingers. I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it. The cheese flavor of cheese puffs varies within a small window only, whereas actual real cheeses have many different ones. When an ideal of course ghosts I toss the future after it. Silk Cuts are okay when they’re customized: cover over the perforations with a torn-off glue strip from a cigarette paper or you can clamp two fingers over the perforations while you smoke to make it proper strength. I do something similar with my vape nowadays. I part-block a valve near the mouthpiece of the vape with my fingertip and in this way I can throttle the vapor. The vape mouthpiece is musical-feeling, like a child’s first wind instrument. Stuff from my mouth and lips comes off on the mouthpiece and can gather in the breathing hole but I can always get a pin or a sharp pencil and gouge the stuff out and wipe it on a trouser leg. I keep the vape in one of my two trouser pockets. Sharp lint from my pocket can get in the breathing hole and shoot into my unsuspecting throat when I vape it. I like vaping all of the time. My vape provides me with my home planet’s gas mix without which otherwise I’d suffocate on Earth’s mix. As with my voice my exhalation made visible by vape in it is an aspect of me that flees me to be with the world and never to return. I like that there’s formaldehyde in vapes but I don’t like popcorn lung. When the juice runs out I taste burning metal. When the juice leaks into your mouth sometimes oh, it’s very obviously poison I’m pulling in. I know about formaldehyde from alien fetuses and big decapitated heads in jars of it but I don’t know about popcorn lung. It’s a very evocative name and an ominously fun euphemism I won’t look up the reality of. I secretly vape on planes, in cinemas, in concert halls; everywhere you can’t vape you can actually very easily vape without discovery. I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. This sort of preemptive gaze is weird, it repulses other’s sight; it relies on being there first, looking first, and on protocol. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapor dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape opaquing my breath. In circumstances where vaping’s not really okay to do I take care to pull on it when I’m quite sure it won’t be my turn to talk or laugh for about twenty seconds, which is about how long the vape takes to entirely dissipate in me. During this time I smile and nod while I hold it in. I can do it. I presume it’s fine to vape everywhere or I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I have the gall to do it in someone else’s house just in front of everyone midconversation without asking. If someone says something I feel terribly guilty. I feel for myself via remembered stilled machines still warm to the touch. I’m shadowing myself through a history of my own impersonal sentimentality the pining for which electro-plates the meaningless with a rose zirconium-like. I sat alone on a low stool at a low table in a pub lounge and customized a Silk Cut. The table and the stool were genuinely small. There was an empty blue glass ashtray and a drained pint glass marbled with beer foam scum on the small table which was round and a brown metal spackled with little hammered divots. My hands are seen from an instructional isometric perspective and my concentrating face is in close-up which in this sequence bravely allows itself the ugly repose of the unobserved. I gave an unaffected performance with my jaw slackened. I bulged some. No visible musculature and no visible veining on my arms. What was I? I’d a pad of green Rizla, a purple-and-white Silk Cut ten-pack and a black plastic lighter with a silver cuff. I got a cigarette paper and tore the glue strip off it. I licked the glue strip and wrapped it around one Silk Cut’s midriff to dress the perforations that make it healthy, closed. Then I took up the lighter and ground the striking wheel slowly with my thumb, moving the lighter up and down just above the Silk Cut, milling invisible flint bits over it. Then I smoked the Silk Cut and the flint bits once caught spat glum sparks when the lit tip was on them. The sparkles and the blued smoke dawdling around my head made my head look like a monument to something on the night of its national holiday. This was when you could smoke inside pubs in the UK. When I run out of cigarettes I collect the squashed butts from the ashtray, split them open along the middle with my thumbnail-like minnows, and empty the stinky spent tobacco into a new cigarette paper to smoke. The catch when smoke goes haltingly past my epiglottis is abject but I could be wrong to use those words—abject, epiglottis. The catch resumes disbelief and with it my body happens in my embrace by myself of it. I know it’s a turnstile, I know it admits smoke or not, I know it’s not the pink teardrop. People start smoking for different reasons. I started smoking when I was twelve I rolled Tony and his flunkies’ cigarettes at Sophie’s party in a barn in Wootton and everyone drenched in Lynx or Impulse. I slipped away and walked home when the little brick of Golden Virginia ran out, purposeless. I often walked the many miles home through the countryside in the middle of the night as a teenager, blank I can’t remember feeling anything. There was no one else anywhere. We’d two welcome pedophiles in the village. Jim had no toes but I loved acting. The image of my future radicalizes and pillories my present. I abuse myself in ways. I like eating tinned hot dog sausages drooped onto sliced white, scribbled with ketchup. I like the iron-blood taste of tinned hot dog sausages and their cold makes them seem found, eaten speculatively. I like modeling balloons pumped with blood meal, it seems. Hot dog sausages are a more appetizing prospect than recognizable meats if you’re like me. I eat ultra-processed meat products as a cannibal. The main ingredient in ultra-processed meats is the ultra-processing, the ultra-processing’s culture and its technologies and histories rather than the beautiful pig in the past. Cannibalism is the correct way to be.

 

From Flower, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April.

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen who is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. In recent years he has presented solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Serpentine Gallery in London, among others, with a survey show at Tate Britain opening in spring 2025. He is the author of A Primer for Cadavers and Old Food.

It was California, so, sandwiches. I sat by the window overlooking Balfour Avenue, at our kitchen table. Its plastic cloth, gray, with a fringe of white yarn. (How did she ever wash that thing?) My mother was moving between the sink and the stove, framed in the doorway to the dining room. Outside was a big lantana with orange moths in it. I remember this as the time when we started to talk to each other a lot. Was I four? I said to her that I was glad I didn’t have to go to school yet. “Oh, yeah?” she said.

The sandwich dear to me in those days was Monterey Jack with mayonnaise and lettuce on Van de Kamp’s sliced white bread.

MY WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN MAYONNAISE

There was a perverse ancillary reason that I liked this sandwich: an ancient cartoon that returned again and again, on Sheriff John’s Lunch Brigade on KTTV, which I never missed. In this, one of the hundreds and thousands of characters from the early days of commercial animation—Sparky? Inky? Horny? Drecky?—ate a sandwich that looked like mine and smacked his lips loudly while he did it. Of course, I could only smack my sandwich this way when I was in front of the TV and my mother was out of the room, and out of earshot. But it did make it taste better.

Abdulah Sidran (1944–2024) was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims during the occupation of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. After World War II, the region became, under Tito, a part of the new socialist republic of Yugoslavia, and Sidran’s father, Mehmed Sidran, became a Communist Party functionary. After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet-led alliance known as Cominform, Mehmed became one of the suspected Soviet sympathizers arrested en masse by Tito’s government. The following excerpt recounts a “family meeting” in the years after Sidran’s father returned from his imprisonment  in the forced-labor camp of Goli Otok, a formerly uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea. You can read more of the Review’s selections from Sidran’s memoir, Scraps, in our new Winter issue, no. 250. 

The roof was leaking again. Dad stopped coming home, and Mom lined the floor with bowls and pots and pans and other dishes everywhere the water was dripping. Because the water dripped so much, Mom got up in the night to empty the containers and returned them to the same places. We always heard when she got up in the night, and we knew what she was doing as soon as she put the dishes back and the drops of water sounded different, falling into the now empty containers. The worst was when the roof leaked over our beds. We had to move them wherever and however just so the water wouldn’t drip on them. Mom said, My God, what have I done wrong? Whenever we heard Mom crying at night, we knew Dad had come home. Mom said, At least don’t wake the kids. Can you promise? Dad pretended not to hear her and said, Conference. Women to the other room. So we had to get up and go over to the table, and Mom took Dina to the other room. Dad sat at the table and cracked his knuckles. Ekrem, Edo, and I sat in silence, waiting for Dad to talk. Dad said, Lest you think I’m drunk, Ekrem will lead the meeting. Ekrem asked what was the agenda, even though it was nighttime, and then Dad took the floor and spoke about his life and communism. You boys will live to the year 2000. By then communism must prevail, you got that? We got that even though we were sleepy. Have you read Germinal, he asked me, and I lied that I had. He told us how he’d gone to school with nanule on his feet and how we had no right to ask for anything beyond that, even though we didn’t ask for anything. While talking, Dad walked around the room, and then he sat down again at the table or on the couch. When he waved a hand from the couch, we knew the meeting was over. To these meetings, he always brought new words. Always a different one. One night he kept saying pretermit, others, permanently or withdrawal. We didn’t know what those words meant, but we used them to tell one conference from another. Ekrem said, You know, that night he kept sayin’ competent. I said, I know.

Mom was crying in the other room, but you could barely hear it because she held a pillow over her face. Dina asked, Why are you crying, Mom? We’ll be happy one day, too. Everyone has to be happy one day. Mom said, When the soil covers me, that’s when I’ll be happy.

I fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love—it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love—blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system.

He was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn’t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he’s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn’t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track.

It’s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn’t true—those were my Saturn return. When I listen to “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck” now, it isn’t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night’s dried cum.

—Geoffrey Mak

I have a copy of Through the Looking-Glass that once belonged to my ex. I would like to have read it. But when I finally got around to cracking it open, a photograph slipped out from the pages. The image was of children’s faces and a cake. I recognized a name written in icing on the cake and then my ex’s ex in one of the children’s faces. I don’t remember what I did with the photo. It felt weird to have it but also weird to throw it out.

My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror.

Lately, I have been having nightmares in which my ex-girlfriend J.—whom I was with, off and on, for more than ten years—treats me like a stranger. These dreams are so disturbing that I wake up from them in the middle of the night. I write them in my journal as soon as possible:

Dreamed I contacted J. and went to her house, which was not her house. She was clearly preoccupied. I asked if she wanted me there. She said she didn’t care. I left.

Dreamed I met J. at a coffee shop with communal seating. I asked for a kiss and she said, “I’m not gonna do that.” Turned out she had a new job. Couldn’t believe I didn’t know about the change.

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover).

SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from?

PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens].

Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love.

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattractive traits, that which is me but is not me. Those I love but don’t love. What I ought to do and be, but neither do nor am.

Reading these poems, which were written between 1939 and 1976, I realized that Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry is always about the discrepancy between who I ought to be and who I am (which leads to the inevitable awkward moment in so many of Ditlevsen’s poems).

Take, for instance, “The Eternal Three,” where love is not the exalted union of two souls; rather, one is always in love with the wrong person. Or “Self-Portrait 1,” where Ditlevsen lists what she can and cannot do: “I cannot: cook / pull off a hat / entertain company … I can: be alone / do the dishes / read books.” Or “Warning”: where the heart “can only dream, not yearn / for what exists in light of day.” In these poems there is so often a longing for something that is not, something that was, something that could be.

Or, in “There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die”: “You had a girl’s dream of a husband and baby, / and you got what you wanted but were still alone.” Fulfilling the dream of family doesn’t bring an end to loneliness, it doesn’t lead to what you thought it would. Instead, you’re split in two—you are now the girl from before, the girl who still lives and cannot die—and the woman who is “left roaming a world of stone.”