🫖 Hello! This is tsundoku, my recommendation column for paid subscribers. The title of the series comes from the delightfully specific Japanese word for a stack of books that you never get around to reading. This one leans literary. Today’s edition includes mostly reading, with a touch of watching, buying and listening. Upgrade your subscription to read the full thing. 🫖
🇫🇷 Paris Review Poem of the Day Newsletter
I was gifted a year-long subscription to the Paris Review, which was a good way to have beautiful-looking print media in my house to page through in rare moments of repose. I’m a self-professed fool when it comes to poetry, and as such, I have found this good old-fashioned newsletter to be a wonderful way to read a poem every day and claw closer to understanding what I do and don’t like. You don’t have to be a paid subscriber to get this newsletter, which feels like a bit of a hack, as many of the featured poems are paywalled online. Two of the recent features moved me to the point of forwarding the emails to friends (lol). Here are some snippets:
loose change &
your shirt on the top of a chest-of-drawers.
a mirror facing the ceiling & the light in a cupboard
left to bum all day a dull yellow
probing the shadowy room “what was it?” (“As Your Eyes Are Blue,” Lee Harwood)✩
I was sent to my room to think things over
So I sat with white dog
On a ledge
Twenty stories high in golden haze
Concrete belfry
Breathing black oxides from the East River Drive
Watching the turd-eating seagulls dive (The Plant Ladies by Sandra Alcosser)