Holiday Wishlist 2013: Online Editor Lauren Barret

It’s been an intense semester for me, as I suspect it was for all our editors. Aside from my duties here at The Journal and my coursework as an MFA student, I was also teaching for the first time in my life. Teaching was exhausting and rewarding, but it also so thoroughly colonized my brain that I had little time to ponder anything else. My reading for fun dwindled to basically nothing, and I spent most of my evenings curled up watching TV and shoveling ice cream in my mouth to deal with lesson planning–related anxiety.

Now that the semester’s over, I’ve got way more brain space to give over to literature, and thanks to my teaching-induced reading hiatus, a significant backlog of books I’ve been meaning to read.

As the semester drew to a close, and deadlines loomed, I found myself immersed in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. It was a delightful form of procrastination (except for some of those middle chapters about Smallweed and Mr. George, when I couldn’t help but shout, “Where, oh where, is Lady Dedlock?”), and I’ll admit I neglected my final revisions in favor of spending more time immersed in the world of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. (Can we talk about Richard Carstone? Namely, how he is the worst?) There’s no real point to this paragraph: I just want it on the public record that I’ve read Bleak House. All 897 pages, and the afterword by Elizabeth McCracken.

Speaking of McCracken, I was recently in Cambridge, MA, and I happened upon a copy of McCracken’s first book of short stories Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry in Harvard Bookstore. (Previous attempts to get it from OSU’s Thompson Library had been unsuccessful.) I barrelled through half of it before I boarded my plane back home to Columbus. McCracken’s stories are surprising and sad and never sentimental. I’m already excited for her new collection, due out in April 2014.

I’m still wading my way through Chris Adrian’s lush and lyrical The Children’s Hospital (which comes in at a not-quite-Bleak House length of 600+ pages) and am content to take it slow. Adrian’s tale of a flood of biblical proportions that leaves only the tricked-out children’s hospital of the title (it has a replicator that can produce anything they need, extra quarters for the staff that now lives there, an “angel” that talks to them) afloat is funny, fantastical, and exceptionally dark. It’s different from (and yet, also, somehow similar to) his 2011 novel The Great Night, which took Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and recast it in current-day San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Adrian, a pediatric oncologist with degrees from both Harvard Divinity School and The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, brings to the page a keen understanding of both the mechanics of our fragile human bodies and our strivings after something greater than ourselves.

I’m in the middle of  three (or rather in the middle of one, and through the first third of two other) essay collections: White Girls by Hilton Als, This Is Running For Your Life by Michelle Orange, and My 1980s and Other Essays by Wayne Koestenbaum.

Beyond that, I’ve heard Beyonce released a new album. Perhaps I should look into that.

Lauren C. Barret is a writer and editor living in Portland, Maine. She received her MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University in 2015, and a BA from Kenyon College many years before that. She tweets at @laurencbarret and tumbls only for you.