I like a book with an absolutely wild plot as much as the next person. That’s one of the great things about books, right? They let us experience some truly unbelievable things, like falling in love on Jupiter or exploring a network of ancient sea caves with a snarky robot sidekick. But sometimes it’s nice to read about ordinary stuff. Boring stuff. Everyday stuff. Sometimes it’s not only satisfying, but downright illuminating, and even world-expanding, to read books that celebrate mundanity. Sometimes you just want to read about your life reflected back to you. And sometimes, reading books like that, something magical happens: you realize something about your life or the world; you make connections you would not have made reading a book about space unicorns or climbing Mt. Everest.

These 10 books — both fiction and nonfiction (and poetry!) — celebrate the everyday. They’re about ordinary things: working in the garden, cooking dinner with your partner, hanging out with friends after a long day. Most of them are not focused on plot, but instead, on the little details that define our lives. There’s a story collection about everyday life in Botswana and one about everyday life in New York City. There are two nonfiction books about diaries and journaling. There’s a novel about sisters that unfolds in a series of breathtaking — and ordinary — scenes.

If you’re looking for adventure, these aren’t the books for you. But if you’re looking for quiet beauty, glorious detail, and books that tell it like it is, you’d better make some space on your TBR.

I knew a birder once. I liked him—it’s pointless to deny it and in any case I don’t think I can write about him without it being abundantly clear—though we redirected early enough that friendship seemed possible. For him it always was a friendship, anyway. Still, the birding excursion was definitely a date. Perhaps he was curious about whether he’d discover feelings for me among the pines—whether what psychologists call the misattribution of desire might be prompted by seeing a rare bird in my presence. We only saw regular birds, though: grackles, goldfinches, a great blue heron.

He was a birder but he was mostly a musician. I would have found it satisfying to discover that these were two sides of the same coin for him: it’s nice, after all, when people cohere, when you can discern a uniform purpose or a set of underlying values across their various pursuits. But the truth, really, is that people are more than one thing, and for most of his life, birds were an inconsequential if benign presence. It wasn’t until the 2020 lockdown that he discovered how far he was willing to go for their sake: a tundra swan in Pittsfield, a Pacific golden plover in Newburyport.

He was a musician first, though—a conductor. This meant he could replicate plaintive calls and fluttering warbles with a melodic accuracy far beyond the typical naturalist’s, and distinguishing between overlapping cries was hardly more difficult than finding the rogue soprano within a thirty-voice section. That comparison is mine, of course: conducting is not so much like birding, if you are really paying attention. Choir is about connection, he told me once—to the music, to other people. But you don’t need other people to walk around a lake in Woburn and check for sleeping owls. I just happened to be there.

He had one friend. This friend lived in Pennsylvania, but they had grown up together, and when he read a strange passage in a book or his car’s brakes were acting funny, that’s who he’d call. He had found that the ease and shared sense of humor born of twenty-five years’ friendship were not easily replicated—at least not without a similar temporal investment. Anyway, that was fine with him. If he had wanted more than one friend he would have networked more aggressively in kindergarten.

I’m not even necessarily the biggest Roth guy. When I got asked to cover “Philip Roth Unbound,” a festival to celebrate and “agitate” his legacy, I hadn’t read but a handful of his books. But, looking over the press release, I was drawn to how intense the schedule was set up to be: three full days of panels, live readings, and comedy shows, all in his hometown of Newark. Roth compared novel-writing to the tedium of baseball, and there was something athletic about how these events were stacked up, one after another, jam-packed with renowned writers and themes encompassing the breadth of Roth’s vision. I’d view this like a marathon, one that I’d need to read the rest of his books to prepare for. I’d read maybe six. He wrote thirty-one. We were a month out. Plenty of time, I decided.

Having read Roth’s debut, as well as Portnoy’s Complaint and the Zuckerman novels through Counterlife, I figured I’d pick up where I left off. I was most drawn to the stretch of novels he wrote in the nineties, when, at fifty, after the death of his father and the failure of his marriage, he self-exiled and “became a monk of fiction,” as David Remnick put it in a 2018 profile. “Living alone in the woods,” he wrote, Roth stayed “trained on the sentence, the page, the ‘problem of the novel at hand.’” This decade produced the novels that would sweep a huge number of major literary awards—a National Book Critics Circle award, a PEN/Faulkner, a Pulitzer, his second National Book Award. Wanting to absorb the fruits of his exile, I exiled myself and, starting with Patrimony—about his father dying, published in 1991, the year I was born—got to reading methodically forward.

I felt awed, in places, by these books’ ambition; impatient, in others, with their unbridled maximalism. Their willingness to meander, to dwell in dialogue, read like luxuries novelists aren’t afforded today. There’s a consistent emphasis on race and class in these books, on the challenges of coexisting in America, that surprised me. Reckoning with one’s roots yet remaining free to defy and define oneself outside of them. This comes through most explicitly in The Human Stain, where his critiques of an unexamined sanctimoniousness undergirding American propriety, Lewinsky-era Puritanism, and lazy campus moralizing read as disconcertingly contemporary. “Canceled older professor with a propensity toward sexual deviance” emerges as an archetype.

Come festival day, I’ve read maybe six more Roth books, not counting audio. I’m currently deep into American Pastoral (1997), Roth’s portrait of the Swede, his most morally upright protagonist, whose morality nonetheless fails him. Walking to CVS to get a new notebook, morning of, the audiobook of The Plot Against America in my ears, I wish I had more time. That I could stay exiled, “trained on the page” forever. But the sun is out; the world is thawing, spring is coming. I dress up nice and hit it.

To read Saskia Hamilton’s “Faring,” the opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen. The morning ticks along as light enters to illuminate both the surrounding structure, window ledge, doves—and the sounds that seep in, wind, construction. To track the light, as the season moves into longer days, is to follow the shadows of others moving here and there behind curtains across the way. The cyclical nature of dawn’s return creates illusions of certainty for future days, though the speaker in “Faring” lives within an illness that names death its cure. This does not prevent love’s negotiation with time, as a child withholds declarations of love in fear of time’s retaliatory embrace. For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it’s the grace we hold.

“Faring” builds its rooms against the too-muchness of life, life’s actual, red-hot intensities, for fear that even the caring inquiry “How are you faring?” will no longer be a relevant question, or that the tracking of the gray morning sunrise will be the only relevant answer.

Like the eighteenth-century abolitionist poet William Cowper, who is called forward in “Faring” by his poem—the book open, perhaps, on the speaker’s bedside table, like table talk—Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life’s weightiness, wariness, worthiness. Three centuries after Cowper, it’s not the countryside but the cityscape that allows Hamilton access to her own inner landscape. 

The brilliance of “Faring,” as well as its task, resides in its narrative charting of daily moments lived as “a soothing down.”

Guild loyalty says I should probably choose a work of fiction for my favorite recent book, but I’m not sure that anyone, with the exception of Octavia Butler, could serve up as glorious a museum of the unimaginable as Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney do in Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. Have you ever seen a spongilla fly cocoon (silk lozenge haloed in a lacy mesh of bridal finery)? How about neatly-ranged eggs laid by a katydid along a blade of grass? I had thought myself well-versed in the range of parasitic terrors until I saw the work of a mummy wasp upon a sphinx moth caterpillar. And leaf miners! When my mortal hour is up, I will look back and see my life divided into the half when I hadn’t known labyrinths like the ones they make existed, and the one after I came to understand that they are everywhere.  

I came to this book when no amount of googling could solve the mystery of who had made the particularly stylized set of tunnels I kept finding on downed poplar in the woods, carved in a pattern I can best describe as a cross between fine hatchet marks, the grooves on a music-box cylinder, morse code, alien messages, and the exuberant scribblings of a child who has discovered the letter i but has only a single sheet of paper. “Dotted insect lines on poplar logs,” “wood beetle straight lines dots poplar,” “straight lines wood downed tree”—try them, they will lead you nowhere. Except they did lead me to Eiseman and Charney’s book. Oh, the pleasure of realizing that something bound can deliver what the internet cannot! Tracks & Sign had a gallery of insect carpentry to choose from. While they didn’t highlight the poplar chiseler I was looking for (I would later learn it was a shipworm—one of those wonderful instances when natural history suggests a deep human history as well), by then it didn’t matter. A great nature e-book both orders the world and leaves one with the sense of a vastness far beyond one’s self. This one does both …

—Daniel Mason, author of “A Case Study”

In nearly eight years of working at the Strand, I’ve become friends with many of the regulars who sell books to the store. Overseen by the Strand’s late owner, Fred Bass, until his death in 2018, our buying desk has always been known as a place to make a quick buck. For some, though, it has become a way to make a living.

Larry Campbell, now seventy-two, has been selling books to the Strand since the early nineties. He was once one of the few people we could count on seeing Monday through Saturday, sometimes multiple times a day. Over the past few years, Larry has come by less frequently, and with far fewer books, but he has always been a welcome character, soft-spoken and kind, at the fast-paced and sometimes tense atmosphere of the buying desk. Here, he discusses his life in New York, and how he got started selling books. This interview—part of an ongoing series of conversations with people who resell books in the city—was conducted across the street from Strand in September 2019.

—Troy Schipdam

Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and forty-five minutes when there is. In reality, there’s no given instance during the day when I actually live twenty minutes from any geographical point in LA, but it’s an easy way to say I live in the middle of town. The area lacks the socioeconomic and demographic cohesion common to most LA neighborhoods, so it’s not particularly cool or uncool, it’s just twenty minutes from places that are. It’s a neighborhood that’s special in the same way a local laundromat is special—you get people from all walks of life.

The building itself is a small, charming holdover from when old Hollywood was just called Hollywood. I park on the street, and I live in one of fourteen modest units, where I am very happy. I’ve lived in old buildings for most of my adult life, and it is my preference to do so. Of course, there are costs associated with living in an old building. You might have an occasional leak or wonky electrical wiring, but these are small problems that can be solved. As with any formative experience, part of the joy in fixing them is the skill gained, or the longevity of the solution. If you fix a leak and you did it right, it’ll take a second for the leak to come back. Once you’ve dealt with something once, it is not such a tragedy the next time. I think that’s what it is to get older: you get softer with age because you’ve experienced a lot of things once, and you’re equipped to do them again if you have to. Remember that first sip of alcohol, or the first cigarette? You turned your back on your innocence, but you didn’t die, so you did it again. However, when a task requires constant maintenance, there is no finish line, so there is no small victory. You never feel done, and it becomes the bane of your existence. The great scourge of my little life, twenty minutes from everywhere else in Los Angeles, is the dust.

LA is a dusty town, and in the century that my building has been around, it has only gathered more of it. The once airtight caulk around the windows has loosened its grip, and the drywall has eroded into Swiss cheese. It doesn’t help that I’m two blocks from an especially busy intersection, and it definitely doesn’t help that I have filled my home with secondhand objects that bring with them their own histories of dust. I clean constantly, with nightly touch-ups and a deep clean that eats up half of an honest weekend. I sweep, Swiffer (dry and wet), and vacuum, but really I am just displacing the dust. As I clean, I kick up more dust, and, betrayed by my own body, I make even more new dust by shedding dead skin cells throughout the process. There is no end in sight, because there is no end to the dust.

I encourage the dust even further by leaving my windows wide open during the day. This is an attempt to cycle out the stale air for fresh air, but who am I kidding? LA is famous for having some of the worst air in the world. But to me it smells good. It smells like everything it has ever touched. It smells like the elements and it smells like argan oil. Sometimes it smells like jasmine, sometimes like wildfires, and, if you try hard enough, it smells like nickels, and the dream of a sweaty handshake from some producer that made moving across the country all worth it, because that handshake is going to change your life. I have knowingly created ideal conditions in which dust thrives, but what’s the point of California if you’re not going to blur the line between indoor and out?

Still, in vain, I clean, because I’m supposed to. I clean because it makes me feel necessary in my own home, and because I come from a long line of people who clean. Even as I clean, on some level I accept defeat. I may be stupid, but I am not dumb. I know I cannot control the dust; it is bigger than me. It was here before me, and it will be here long after I am gone. I am but a guest in a world covered in dust. It’s everywhere—not just in my apartment or at that intersection, or in California but everywhere. Between all the space where there is oxygen, look a little harder—there’s dust. You can’t see it until you do, and what you call it might depend on how long your hair is: dead space, vibes, the ether. Between enemies, it might be called animus; between two lovers, it might be the Fourth of July. But it really isn’t any of that. That which separates your face from mine is just dust. In death, I will become dust, when in reticence I’ll accept that I can’t beat ‘em, so I join ‘em. You, me, and everyone else—we’re all dust that just hasn’t formed yet, but until I am dust, I will continue to move it from one place to the next.

Steak is like sex, is like art: bloody; gets you high; is disgusting if you think about it for too long. And blue steak, then, is like sex work: a carefully crafted artifice that allows for the presentation of something ostensibly raw to the consumer, without the risks of actual raw consumption. The person who orders blue steak feels it as real, and animal, though it is sanitized, and carefully so.

In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience.

I played the song for myself after, alone in my own room. A user called “i’m cyborg but that’s ok” had uploaded it to YouTube along with a compilation of scenes from Lost in Translation, a movie I’d never seen but that I knew was about a relationship between a washed-up older man having a midlife crisis and a beautiful young woman. The video compilation looked like an escort advertisement: in the opening scene, Scarlett Johansson sits in a hotel room window wearing only a large men’s shirt—blue—looking down at the wide expanse of Tokyo beneath her; in the next scene, she dives into an enormous, empty hotel pool, at night—the pool and the surrounding windowpanes all blue, too. The images spoke of money and alienation. The song captured the affect of a certain type of client: slightly flat; grasping toward a Daddy-esque certainty but falling short; single-mindedly offering reassurance, but of what he hardly seemed to know. I grew oddly attached to the song and to cyborg’s music video for a period. I would watch it on my way to work, flattening my own affect, compacting myself into a version of a girl aligned with the lyrics:

Whispered something in your ear
It was a perverted thing to say
But I said it anyway
Made you smile and look away
Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby.