How to Read When the Cracks Appear

A survival guide for the end-times

I was introduced to the concept of winter as a verb — wintering — through Katherine May’s book which uses it as a title and throughline, treating the cold season as a metaphor for “deeply unfashionable things: slowing down, resting, retreating”. This idea of wintering as stepping back from the onslaught of the world to gather the internal nourishment needed before facing outwards again is contextual for me, limited by the geography in which I find myself. I know winter first as December — because of Karachi, where the season is marked by music stirring every night. And this past winter I embraced Chile for the first time, where December isn’t winter at all but the depth of summer.

These geographies, which constitute my and my fiancé’s forever homes, have seemed particularly joyful in the past months from our perch in the United States, where we came separately half a decade ago, where we met, and where we chose to stay and attempt to build a life. In the past months, Washington DC, where I have been based for almost four years, has become a difficult city to live in. It’s hardest on the spirit. Daily, the city forces me to reckon with the dissonance of calling it home, of my proximity to a stronghold of power that runs counter to my deepest values. It’s tempting and impossible to turn away from the news cycle, a dichotomy that got me thinking about wintering as resistance rather than retreat. And because the process of making sense of the world around me has always started with reading, my period of wintering became one of deciding how I could read my way out of my despair.

In an essay for The Yale Review, Isabella Hammad wrote recently: “Over the course of the past year, my reading habits have narrowed. As Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza expanded to Lebanon with the complicity and support of many of the world’s great powers, I found myself passing over books that failed to offer me a route into thinking about the great brutality of the period through which we are living.”

Rather than narrowing though, my reading habits have expanded so voraciously that I’ve abandoned my strict rule of finishing sixty books per year and have surrendered to the indulgence of being pulled in myriad directions at once, picking up books without much justification and abandoning them without much guilt. I wanted to share the pages I’ve sought and lingered on, and paying homage to Isabella Hammad (mentioned above) and Elaine Castillo (mentioned below), I’ve structured what follows as a list of how to read during this current moment, when cracks are appearing everywhere, especially within myself. When I list the litany of all that is wrong in the world right now, I am arrested most by my complicity in it all: the taxes I pay to this government that has no allegiance to me.

1. Expand your definition of reading

In the opening of “How to Read Now” — an essay collection on the politics and ethics of reading — Elaine Castillo writes: “When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m talking about how to read our world now. How to read films, TV shows, our history, each other. How to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.”

One way I’ve been reading the world is by paying microscopic attention to food labels, a practice that emerged immediately after I opened Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People, a polemic about how difficult it has become to avoid eating manufactured ingredients, and how these particularly affect low-income communities while expanding conglomerates’ profit margins. The label on the back of a jar of instant chicken bouillon cubes revealed that they were made of: salt, sugar, corn syrup solids, hydrolyzed corn protein, monosodium glutamate, sodium bicarbonate. Towards the end of the ingredient list was a note that the cubes contained less than 2% of chicken. It turned out, many of my home-cooked meals likely contained more processed chemicals than I realized. I started saving chicken bones in a Ziploc bag in my freezer, and making my own stock on weekend mornings. Sometimes I throw in a sprig of thyme on the cusp of going off, or drop in carrot skins or half an onion. It’s the most undiscriminating of processes, and therefore the most forgiving.

2. Remember that the present is no stranger to the past

In the weeks leading up to a long-planned trip to Karachi to see our parents, my sister called me every morning with the same question — with Pakistan as one of the potential blacklisted countries, would she be able to return to her home and husband if she went ahead with her trip? We debated the risk — surely she would be okay, given her British passport and Permanent Resident Card, but then again we were living in a world where no rules seemed to apply.

During this time, when every lawyer she spoke to advised her not to leave the United States, I thought constantly of Shahnaz Habib’s Airplane Mode, a travel memoir rooted in the history of how our freedom has always been dictated by the colour of our skin. She describes the pass enslaved people in the American South were required to carry when traveling beyond the border of their owners’ properties and how, during the Civil War, this system was extended to White people as well: “This is one of the central ironies of the passport system. The same passport that represented mobility to one set of people represented restrictions to another group, in the same way that a First World passport today opens doors that a Third World passport can only dream of.”

The groundwork for any current travel ban was laid in the long history of limited movement experienced only by citizens of non-Western countries. This is true of everything unfolding around us today — it has happened, in some shape or form, before.

Two of the most powerful works I’ve encountered in recent months have been Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones, a memoir of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, and I’m Still Here, a film about Eunice Paiva in the days, weeks, and years after her husband was taken from their home during Brazil’s military dictatorship following the 1964 coup d'état. Both center mothers holding their families together during impossible times, and both are evidence that the act of witnessing has a long aftermath. Stories like these remind me of both sets of my grandparents, who triumphed over far worse (the partition of the subcontinent and arriving in a new country with nothing but the clothes on their back) than I ever have, with far less. Immersing myself in the past is far from comforting — I’m left wondering whether anything will correct the course of history — but it makes apparent that my role right now is to observe, record, and preserve.

3. Think about the words you hear, and the ones you use

In an episode of the Between the Covers podcast, the journalist Omer el Akkad, talking about his new book One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, says: “We have to throw everything we have as writers against the machine invested in unmaking meaning.”

I thought of this idea constantly while reading Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, a sci-fi novel about a man called Marcos who works at a local processing plant, after it was reported that an infectious virus made all animal meat poisonous and the government initiated a “Transition” into cannibalism. From the first page, the novel felt uncanny: “When he wakes, his body is covered in a film of sweat because he knows that what awaits is another day of slaughtering humans. No one calls them that, he thinks, as he lights a cigarette. He doesn’t call them that when he has to explain the meat cycle to a new employee. They could arrest him for it, even send him to the Municipal Slaughterhouse and process him. Assassinate him, would be the correct term, but it can’t be used… He goes to the refrigerator and pours himself cold water. He drinks it slowly. His brain warms him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.”

The harder it becomes to speak one’s mind in a surveillance state, the more I speak my mind to myself within the forever unlocked pages of my Classic Moleskine. Giving myself the space to react without holding back is liberating, allowing me to validate my daily anxieties instead of brushing them away.

4. Do not try to generate hope in isolation

One of the most hopeful books for the current moment is Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s Another World is Possible, a compendium of case studies from around the world detailing how countries have implemented innovative policies that profoundly improved their citizens’ quality of life while also showing tremendous economic returns. From Norway’s paid parental leave that actually led to fathers taking on a greater share of domestic work to Finland’s universal public education system that gave both students and teachers greater autonomy over their learning and their schedules, Hakimi Zapata lays out that hope is an exercise rooted in listening.

It’s a great metaphor, too, for the power of community. I have felt the most hopeful when meeting others who are grappling with the same questions I am, in book clubs, open mics, neighborhood walking tours. I went on a poetry hike (sign up for the next one here if you are DC-based) a couple of weekends ago, through a just-blooming Rock Creek Park, and was touched by the tenderness of so many strangers’ kindness. We cheered for one another when tightroping across a gully; read aloud poems by Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton, Aimee Nezhukamatail; and stopped at a picnic site to write out affirmations on seed paper. I exchanged numbers with a new friend I made, and she texted me this morning, “just checking in and still saying hi”. I loved that. Still saying hi.

These moments remind me that I am not alone, that good — deeply good — people exist and are everywhere, and that we are united in our desire to heal the broken world we share.

5. Never forget that life is finite

My sweet friend Andrew reminded me recently of a book I had on my shelf but hadn’t finished. Letters from Max, a compilation of letters exchanged between the poet Max Ritvo and his teacher Sarah Ruhl during the years he fought and succumbed to cancer. The letters are an ode to writing, friendship, and life and how sublime these three are when stirred together. “I’m bitter, Sarah, I’m bitter and love the world and it won’t love me back,” Max writes to Ruhl, exhausted after a spell of chemo. It’s a gift to be alive and far enough away from death to know that there are so many years still to love the world. And I don’t understand — I don’t ever want to understand — how to love the small, ordinary things in this world without also wanting those small, ordinary things to belong to us all.

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Because it’s so easy to get sucked into doom-scrolling, I wanted to find a way to witness the world around me without being defeated by it, to protect, at all costs, my love for life. As I build my archive of this era — my archive of sensemaking, resistance, and love — I’m curious to hear how you’ve been reading lately, too.