Reigniting your passion for reading! No small task you’ve set for me, Michael, but I think we can find some remedies for what ails you.

Without knowing why, exactly, you’ve become disenchanted with reading, I’m going to have to make some guesses and then base my recommendations off of those conjectures. If your being a former English professor is partly at fault, we’ll move away from the English language entirely: Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez was translated from its original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Fernandez is originally from Santiago, Chile, and Space Invaders is about a group of friends growing up under the Pinochet regime, and the former classmate those now-grown friends are attempting, as a collective, to recall. I’m personally a sucker for a novel written from the perspective of a group, but Fernandez’s story balances inventiveness with emotional impact, using crisp, precise language to describe the amorphous and imperfectly-remembered past. It’s powerful, delicate, stylish—the kind of short, knockout novel that should reinvigorate your love for the form.

But maybe the problem isn’t English, maybe the problem is the novel itself. Great news—other forms of the written word exist, and what’s a play but a book with some odd formatting? I recommend checking out Will Eno’s brilliant full-length play The Realistic Joneses, which contains, in my opinion, some of the best dialogue I’ve ever read in a play, novel, or et cetera. The premise is simple: a couple moves into a house next to that of another couple. That’s it. There’s no way to describe something as being about love and life and what it means to carry on without sounding trite. Instead I’ll emphasize that I’ve never read dialogue this deft—I wasn’t aware someone could be this good at writing lines by turn funny and devastating, lines that are stylized yet just as grounded and human as the characters behind them. I’m not much of a re-reader, Michael, but I return to The Realistic Joneses over and over again. I’ve never seen it performed; reading it is enough. I hope it will be that way for you, too. And then, afterwards, maybe you’ll reach for another book (or play).