Earlier this year, I published a list of “things I find randomly chic.” It was a pastiche of mannerisms and preferences that I have observed in the deeply stylish: pairing something masculine with something feminine, cursive handwriting, having “an order” at a restaurant. Above all: sincerity, that rare and treasured quality of the curious and good-hearted. As I was drawing up this list, I noticed an entire branch of observations clustered around the arts of writing and reading—so much so that I started a separate catalog to keep track of them all. I found myself thinking with care about the tactility of the page and our relationship to it and reflected on the many-faceted interactions we have with the books we love and equally with those we hate, or DNF, or anything in between. There is much to plumb here. After all, we relate to books physically, emotionally, intellectually, and even in a creative capacity, in the sense that, as readers, we are always co-constructing the living and undulating text in front of us. The book changes each time it is opened, and we bring new moods and experiences to it. Books I first read at ten, or twenty, or even last Tuesday now echo with new sensitivities and glint with previously hidden meaning.
I’ve joked recently that one strange part of turning 40 has been relating to a different (older) generation of character in the novels I’ve loved since my youth. For example, I was startled, on my most recent revisiting of Little Women, by a fresh bloom of tenderness toward Marmie March that I’d not witnessed in my younger self, who was all eyes on Jo. A pleasure of repeat reading, then, are second findings and kindling fondnesses. This draws me to my broader point here, which is that I have always found myself drawn to repeat readers. I consider their inclinations — their seasonal re-readings of certain books, their “I’m starting this series over again for the fourth time” proclamations — deeply stylish because they imply rich self-knowledge. The mood is I know what I like, and I know where to get it, and I am going to read exactly as I please beside it.
If a big milestone in aging with grace is becoming an expert in oneself, I’d hedge that the repeat readers out there are ahead of the curve.
A few other bookish things I find “randomly chic” that signal this kind of deep self-knowledge and advanced style:
- Annotated pages
- Personal inscriptions (my father inscribes the date and city in which he finishes each book he reads on its frontispiece)
- Cloth binding, serif fonts, deckled edges (all cues that someone cared deeply about the physical experience of the book)
- Asterisms and other archaic punctuation
- Any sort of heath / moor / mist / fog situation with a brooding love interest
- The enemies-to-lovers trope
- Sally-Rooney-level believable dialogue
- Ex libris plates
- Sentences that reveal character with minimal exposition
- Yellowed or dog-eared or sea-splattered pages (proof of life)
- Rich allusions
- A home library that suggests heavy use
- The awareness of emerging from a book as a different person
What would you add to this list? What do you find, in the world of reading and writing, deeply stylish?
