Reading to Write
My version of the beach read or, the books that inspired & shaped my own
If you want to write, you need to read is pretty standard writing advice. I’ve heard it many times from many writers including best-selling and well-known authors. Another version of this advice is if you want to be a writer, you have to, of course, write. But even before that, you have to read. One of my favourite parts of writing Mother Tongue Tied was accumulating books on the subjects I was writing about and stacking them around my home office.1 I would often switch up the stacks depending on the chapter I was writing or if I was stuck on something. I am pretty sure this did absolutely nothing to help the writing but it was great procrastination! As my book is non-fiction and blends academic research, memoir and case studies, I referenced many, many books and journal articles and often returned to old favourites for inspiration and encouragement.
Sure, sometimes it makes me anxious having stacks of books I have very limited time to read around me but most of the time, it is a great comfort. And yes, I have also been known to practise tsundoku the Japanese word for buying a lot of books and keeping them in a pile with the intention of reading them even if you have yet to do so. Give me a teetering pile of books any day!
Below, I want to share a sort of reading list in the form of two stacks of books I referenced and read for MTT. These piles do not include all the books as some were pdfs or borrowed from the library and had to be returned. I would have included the other two Levy books in her trilogy for example but I lent them to my mom a few months ago. I’ve split the books up into two piles: one more academic, the other narrative non-fiction but the lines do blur. Consider this the ubiquitous beach read recommendation newsletter for your holiday. It is not lost on me most of these books are not traditionally considered “beach reads” but they are my beach reads and in fact, I read a few of these books while on a beach! (If you are wondering, yes, I read the French books thanks to my French immersion education but it has been so long since I read in French so it took me a long time to finish each book. I also often had to read sentences multiple times to really comprehend what the writer was saying.)
Now it is time for you to tell me what you are reading this summer please. And no, it does not have to be anything related to language or multilingualism. I also recently finished Yellowface by R.F. Kuang and the breathtaking book by Anne Boyer, The Undying. I am currently reading Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor but really need to try some lighter (smuttier?!) reading to balance things out. Thanks to my friend L, I have a great collection of beach (smut) reads to get me started.
Happy reading.
Mother Tongue Tied has a comprehensive bibliography so you can find every book I cited and referenced at the end of the book.
I just got your book in the Nomad Bookshop in London, thank you so much for writing this book. You drove me to tears in your introduction chapter alone, as someone who’s a mother of 2 young children, having my heritage language in Cantonese but growing up in Mandarin, although my working/reading language has been English since almost 20 years, and we live in Germany. So there are a lot of confusions and guilts in choosing what language I use around my children.
I finished The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal last night and loved it. It's a small book, but written with precise details and is on the topic of cooking and food, which I love. Similarly spare (and somewhat food centric) was The Lovers, a Novel by Paulo Luczkiw, which I also read quickly and found romantic.
I also loved Braiding Sweetgrass and picked up Gathering Moss this summer, but am making my way through it a bit more slowly. Im finding the need for some lighter material also - writing that is simple, beautiful, romantic in its descriptions and in what it leaves out, which I thought both The Cook and The Lovers did really well.