Quiet, please.

Proof not needed.

All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.¹

Norway, Gudvangen fjord. photo by cewilkins 9.2018

I’m drawn to quiet books. Books that don‘t feel they need to explain or prove. Books that don’t need a sequel, don’t strive to be a trilogy or series. Books in which landscape and time are so sensorially drawn that I am there and it is only when glancing up from the page that I realize I’m not. Stories in which character is so finely detailed I’m no longer reading about him but akin in visceral feelings and thoughts and am unexpectedly brought face-to-face with that which was unperceived in myself.

Anyone that leans to look into a pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes, and these things are true without argument, and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them.²

Literary books are hard to read on a phone or beach where distractions abound, but nestled on the couch they are impossible to set down even though you should have started dinner an hour ago. When I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, I willingly fell into the telling, immersed in the rich sound and rhythm of language, living alongside characters offering questions of depth so I can live them too.

These seemingly unimposing books I call quiet books, whether novels or memoirs they plumb the depths of human nature, use the personal to tip the universal to include us the reader, so we can see we are not alone, not unheard, not unknown.

These things, the way they fall into place. The people we would be if these things were otherwise.³

These are the books that stir memory, body, and soul before the mind can critique, concoct meaning, or decry lack of proof. This, I think, is their unpretentious power, when as the reader I experience an unsolicited intimacy within the pages. When I can’t look away because the author has unearthed a truth, a craving, a secret, a lie within me. This is what I want to read.

What do you want to read?

1 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
2 Ibid.
3 So many ways to begin by Jon McGregor