A Giving Tuesday Note
on the joy of reading together
Dear friends,
It’s been a joy to read with APS Together and all of you this year. Starting with Homer and Emily Wilson’s thrilling translation of The Odyssey, through The Lover by Marguerite Duras, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, and finally Charles Dickens’s monumental novel Bleak House. An enormous thank you to our fabulous APS Together hosts who shared these books with us: Stefania Heim, Honor Moore, Antoine Wilson, Han Ong, and Yiyun Li.
APS Together always reminds me that while we are reading individually, I am also always making connections across these books. It’s perhaps the instinct of an editor of a literary magazine: That curiosity in seeing how a piece changes, is illuminated, by what you place alongside it. The new with the ancient. The poem with the photograph. What each of these different viewpoints brings.
Or as Yiyun described it in terms of reading at last night’s finale conversation for Bleak House: “I pay a lot of attention to how the characters affect each other. Think about Mr. Bucket. He’s an interesting man, because he has different effects on different characters. He’s a real person, not just one effect. An unsuccessful character has the same effect on all the characters in a novel; a successful character has different effects.”
This has been one of the great pleasures of reading together with all of you: To see the different effect a sentence, a character, an insight has on each of us. It reminds us that great literature is ever boundless.
This Giving Tuesday, help us continue our mission of bringing richness and depth to reading great works of literature. Your support, at every level, helps to keep APS Together free and open to all. The more readers, the more perspectives, and the more expansive the world becomes.
With gratitude,
Brigid Hughes, and all of us at A Public Space