I sent a pretty good draft of my new prose book, Happiness Exposed, to my editor about three weeks ago and told myself to stop rewriting until I heard back from him. In fact though, I entirely rewrote the book’s final chapter and then asked him to swap out my new one with my old one. Then I reapplied myself to leaving the book alone, “let some body heat get out of it” as E.B. White said about Charlotte’s Web, explaining why he left the manuscript in a desk drawer for a while. My plan was to wait for comments, and in the meantime I’d “read for the book,” a term I don’t generally voice, which means read books that in any tangential or immediate way might bear on “the book.” Too bad for me, I discovered that I don’t feel like reading anything about the stuff I’ve already written about—the things I really wanted to read about, say, drugs and happiness, got themselves read during the processes of my writing. By “got themselves read” I mean that while I am writing my prose books, which are history, philosophy, and I supposed cultural studies, I have relevant books all over the apartment, in Seussian piles, and I read them all at once. I have to set this up in advance, so in expectation of writing a chapter I seek out and buy online the books I will need: while I’m finishing chapter one, chapter two’s books are speeding towards me. Then I look the books over for a thesis I want to know about at the outset, and if I don’t see one in these fresh books, I turn from them and start writing. (Of course I’ve been thinking about and reading about the chapter subject for a long time, that’s why I’ve got a chapter on it.) I go back to the books when I have specific questions, and when the book is good, I read the whole thing, otherwise perhaps only the relevant chapters.

The categories of books that were strewn vertically and in concentric circles around the chairs for Doubt had subjects that varied across the world and the centuries, (enough to make my husband laugh at the weird combinations of books that arrived), but their variety was not as pixilated as for Happiness Exposed. Here are five that were great for the book and that are still out on my tables: The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies by Lane; Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, by Dominic Streatfeild; the brilliant Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison; Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940, edited by Kathryn Grover; and Marina Warner’s wonderful From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Lane’s book is a pretty remarkable treatment of what we have learned about happiness, or think we have, from statistics, questionnaires, and other studies—it might be too dense if you weren’t a motivated reader, but if you want to know the answer to that question, I like this book better than some others that have gotten broader attention. It could be a little passionate and extensive for some, just like Warner’s and Harrison’s, but I love them all. Streatfeild’s book is journalistically chatty but smart and even subtle. It answered what I wanted to know about the history of cocaine and happiness. Harrison’s edited volume is scholarly essays, but I can’t imagine anyone not having some fun here.

Writing my happiness book made me think a lot about how we enact happiness through celebration and community, and how meanings of different happinesses change over time. Sometimes a nice happy girl ought to take her laudanum and stay away from sports; sometimes it is the other way around. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the way our stories work for us, in poems, movies, myths, and the evening news. Which is why one of the two books I am reading now is The Sociology of News by Michael Schudson. He says interesting things, like how “the news” as we know it was born in the era of the telegraph, and so, in rejection the usual ideas of narrative (in which you do not “give away” the story), news articles “telegraph” the who what when where, so that the important headlines could, in fact, be telegraphed. Good, right?

The other book I am reading was oddly chosen. I don’t read fiction. I think the last fiction I read was Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, which I also read when I was pregnant and trying to not write for a little while. Anyway, a few months ago I got an email from A.M. Homes asking me if I had a relative named Hecht who was a butcher in the East Village in the early twentieth-century. That is where my family’s Hecht’s were at the time, so I asked my 94-year-old grandmother, who is as lucid as I am, though at this point much shorter, and she didn’t recognize the idea or any of the other info. My sister and our friend James both responded to the anecdote I told about this in the same way: so ardent was their love for A. M. Homes, that they would have me lie to A. M. and invent some Hechts, just to have her in our lives. I emailed her the sad news: no butcher.

So when John was on his way to Barnes and Noble with the baby the other day, I requested some A. M. Homes. I was wanting something critical, non-fiction; something that might give me an insight that would help me finalize the conclusions in "Happiness." I did not recall what A. M. Homes wrote, but I remembered the adoring response of sister and James and took a shot. Husband, John, came back with a novel and with Things You Should Know, which is short stories. I was sorry it wasn’t criticism but since I am trying to put down “the book” for a few more days, I picked up the short stories. Wow, so much flesh and effluvia! Reading philosophy all day, you do happen upon the sticky body, but not with such intimacy of perspective. Anyway, it is great and surprising and probably just what I need right now.

My virtual bedside table, meaning those books now speeding toward me, include poetry by Deborah Landau and Joy Katz, poets who I know and I just sort of got my act together to order their books; a book on the art history of clothes by Anne Hollander; and two books by Janet Malcolm. Oh and my new poetry book, Funny, came in the mail two days ago! The five copies I have (having given one to my in-laws last night) are scattered around the apartment in their glory! I took the cover photograph: a nice bowl of soup with a fork; my favorite photographer, Jean Jenesque, took the author photo on the back. It is very exciting.