What's your seashore? | Part Five | Holly S. shows us something good to read.

Video Transcript

My seashore is really books and reading. I’ve always been a reader. In my family, it sort of became a joke, even when I was young, that my cousins would be out playing around, and I would be in a corner with my nose in a book. Luckily, my sweetheart likes walking through bookstores as much as I do, because we do that together, and he doesn’t mind when I’ve got a stack of books next to the bookshelf because they won’t fit on the bookshelf.

I just feel better with books around, and I love reading. I’ve brought a few of my favorites.

Some books that I loved when I was growing up: “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” “Tender is the Night,” if you love Fitzgerald, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter;” if you ever want your heart broken in the most exclusive, beautiful way, it’s a great book. I actually studied poetry when I was in graduate school, and these were two of my favorites:

I met Jean Valentine, actually, and I turned into a total fangirl when I met her; it was embarrassing. And Claudia Rankine; if you haven’t checked out one of her books, you should do yourself a favor. These just blew my mind in the best way. They’re not Robert Frost, you know; they’re amazing things.

Nowadays, I read for different reasons, I guess. I used to read to escape or to enter a fantasy world, or to experience the profound depth that poetry can give me. Now, I like to read historical fiction, and I like to read nonfiction. I read now because I’m a writer for a living. I read nonfiction to figure out how to get better. This author, Timothy Egan, wrote a really great book called “The Worst Hard Time” about the Dust Bowl, and I read his prose and I’m like, “How do you do that?”

So yeah, I read for instruction, and I read for fun, and I read because it’s like an old friend. That’s it. That’s my seashore!