Pathological Relations: Hayley Earnest
Hayley Earnest (@hylyrnst) reads and sometimes draws in New York City.
The last thing you finished reading
Javier Marias, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
The last thing you abandoned reading
I think I’m afraid of abandoning books because I have the idea that once I start I won’t be able to stop abandoning books, but maybe I need to trust myself that I won’t do that. I last abandoned The Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale because it was too fluffy and I wanted something knife-like.
Next on your list
I’m in the rare position to peacefully be able to say what I will be reading next, which if everything goes according to plan is The Fruit Thief, Peter Handke.
Something on your list but you never begin
Life, A User’s Manual [Georges Perec]. It never feels like the ‘right’ time ... But when is the right time? When I’m about to die??
Something in which you have no interest
Right now I’m not interested in finishing In Search of Lost Time. I have one volume left and I’ve tried starting it but I just can’t do it.
Worst thing you’ve read cover to cover
Summer of Hate by Chris Kraus was pretty bad, I don’t hold it against her though.
Something you reread
I had been anti rereading for a long time, it felt lazy to me, or I didn’t want to diminish the energy of a book by over mining it. But last year one night I had nothing to bring with me on the train so I took my copy of Bolaño’s A Little Lumpen Novelita and it was so perfect, even better than the first time. Since then I’ve revisited some of Bolaño’s shorter works in between new books and I just kept finding more and more there (like walking through a large house with many dark rooms).
Something you never forget
From Bernhard’s Gargoyles, “Every day I completely built myself up, and completely destroyed myself.”
Conditions in which you read best
On the train going over a bridge, sitting alone in my apartment in my new chair, locked up.
Conditions in which you read most often
The train, behind the counter at 192 Books.
Conditions in which you cannot read
I think about reading in bars but then I get there and remember that there’s music and people and it’s very dark and I just can’t do it so I get a drink and stare instead.
A favourite author
Balzac
A favourite genre, form, theme
Shadows, obsession
A favourite title
I think Your Face Tomorrow is a very cool title and the Cioran title The Temptation to Exist makes me laugh.
A favourite book cover
Thomas the Obscure, Maurice Blanchot
A favourite recent read
Among Women Only, Cesare Pavese (This is what I mean when I say knife-like).
A favourite nostalgia read
It’s only been a few years since I first read it but The Sarah Book, Scott McClanahan.
A favourite greatest of all time, personal canon read
I’m not the first and won’t be the last to say Malina
Do you annotate
Sometimes light pencil marks (underlines and dots) next to lines I want to return to either to copy down in a word doc for research or to share with someone. I wasn’t in the habit until I started reading Handke’s The Weight of the World slowly last year.
Do your books tend toward any condition
Little slips of paper in them
Do you have any books that are prized possessions
I have this small, not quite postcard-sized piece of fabric that’s printed with the Malina cover (after some research I think it’s the cover of an old Polish edition?). Someone sent it to me in the mail, I’m not sure where he got it and I didn’t ask but it’s been nailed to my wall ever since.
A text that surprised you
The Possibility of An Island, Houellebecq. I had read the beginning of my brother’s copy of Submission years before and was Not interested but this I got at a garage sale in LA and read on the plane back home and I found it really beautiful and hopeful and not so nasty! Since then I’ve read everything else by him. (This is also a contender for favorite book title).
A text that disappointed you
Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas. I’d been wanting to read him for a while because he seemed up my alley but I found that it just made me want to read all the other works it mentioned.
And much of Annie Ernaux but I still keep reading her for some reason.
A text that altered you somehow
Every text alters me, I am never the same.
Open up a text and copy a line at random
“And meanwhile another day, how dreadful, another day, how fortunate.”
— Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Javier Marias
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