This is part of a newsletter series documenting the pandemic of 2020 and offering a close reading of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. You can access the full series by clicking on the “novel study” category above the post or the “Austen” tag beneath the post. Access the complete story spreadsheet for the novel [here].

It’s week thirteen of 2020. How’s everyone doing? Here in San Francisco, we are finishing our second week of sheltering in place and slowly building new routines and rituals. The cats have finally learned that the household no longer wakes up at 6:00 a.m. and keep snoozing alongside us. I have finally learned that endless scrolling makes me more anxious rather than less, and remembered that working on paper can help me focus when I’m struggling.

One thing I haven’t been doing much of is reading, outside of my editing work. My brain skitters away from the words on the page, and my heart dreads the terrible fate I suspect is in store for some of the characters in my current read (the wonderful fantasy novel Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb). I’ve been doing more watching – the stellar Mandalorian series and LEGO Masters with my kids, and soothing videos about making knives out of potatoes or resurrecting old machines with my partner.

But I miss the slow, quiet peacefulness of reading, the way a good book creates an alternate world that exists both inside and outside your mind. To get back to it, I’m going to turn to old favorites and reliable pleasures already on my shelves, starting with Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

And I’m inviting you to read alongside me, if you like! Starting next week in the newsletter, I’ll be sending you a new chapter of the novel each week, along with some observations about what Austen is up to and how you can apply her lessons to your own work. I’ll also be building a story spreadsheet for the novel, so you can see an example of what this key editing tool can show you. If you haven’t read Persuasion, well, you are in for a treat, and if you have read it, now is the perfect time to treat yourself to it again. I can’t wait to show you everything I admire about it.

In the meantime, if you want more reading, I’ve created a reading list of my recommended books for writers at Bookshop.org, an online bookseller established to benefit independent bookstores: https://bookshop.org/shop/bluegarret.

Here’s to reading all the words, y’all,
Kristen

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