What I’m Re-Reading - From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

All I did as a kid, it seemed, was re-read. There was the public library, of course, but I was most attached to the books I’d gotten my mom to buy me at Borders, and I would pore over them repeatedly. I’d do the same with magazines. Life without scrolling was a life of deep attention to whatever was at hand, and I’m grateful to have grown up then—re-reading, re-listening, re-watching. Sometimes, of course, it was a cereal box or a shampoo bottle, but often, it was repeated readings of an issue of Vogue picked up at the grocery check-out; teeny-bopper magazines like Twist or YM; and my small personal library, stocked with books chosen willy-nilly: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland for its cover; The Metapmorphosis by Franz Kafka because I’d heard his name around; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy because I loved the title and heard the boys in Radiohead enjoyed it. (They were my influencers.) I don’t think I understood it; I should read it again. Re-reading engrained things in me—ideas, gra

All I did as a kid, it seemed, was re-read. There was the public library, of course, but I was most attached to the books I’d gotten my mom to buy me at Borders, and I would pore over them repeatedly. I’d do the same with magazines. Life without scrolling was a life of deep attention to whatever was at hand, and I’m grateful to have grown up then—re-reading, re-listening, re-watching. Sometimes, of course, it was a cereal box or a shampoo bottle, but often, it was repeated readings of an issue of Vogue picked up at the grocery check-out; teeny-bopper magazines like Twist or YM; and my small pe