Not This Book, Not Now: Reading Sarah Gilmartin’s Service

Not This Book, Not Now: Reading Sarah Gilmartin’s Service

I finished the book, but I didn’t go to the meeting.

The novel was the month’s selection for a women’s book club I had recently joined. I read it because I want community. At this stage of life, that word carries weight. Community means a room of thoughtful people, a shared conversation, the possibility of friendship that grows slowly through ordinary rituals—tea, chairs in a circle, books passed from one reader to another. So I read the book. But when the day of the meeting arrived, I stayed home.

Sarah Gilmartin’s Service is a novel about power, memory, and sexual misconduct in the hierarchical world of a high-end restaurant. The story unfolds through multiple perspectives—those of a celebrated chef accused of abuse, the young waitress who once worked under him, and the wife who must confront the collapse of his reputation. The novel is interested in how stories are told and retold, how memory shifts, and how guilt, self-protection, and social pressure shape what people are willing to admit.

It is a thoughtful premise and an important one. Yet from the beginning, I had the uneasy feeling that this was not the book for me right now. Part of the reason lies in the way fiction sometimes collapses into lived experience. Years ago, a friend told me about working as a British cook in a French restaurant in London. In that kitchen, two senior staff members—a man and a woman—had a pattern of preying on young hires. New cooks arrived hopeful, eager to learn, unaware of the emotional games that would be played with them. My friend described how broken some of these young men became. One, he said quietly, did not survive.

When a novel echoes stories like that, it stops being fiction alone. It becomes an archive of memory. And those memories do not stay neatly contained. They pull in others: things we witnessed, conversations that still sit uneasily in the mind, the broader patterns that become visible only in hindsight. Anyone who has lived and worked in international spaces—moving between cultures, countries, and institutions—knows how easily power can hide inside prestige and mobility. In recent years we have watched those structures exposed again and again, whether in the entertainment industry, politics, or the shadowy networks of wealth and influence that operate across borders.

The novel’s structure reflects this complexity. By shifting among perspectives, Service refuses to present a single stable truth. Each narrator remembers differently. Each account is partial. What happened becomes a contested narrative rather than a clear resolution. From a literary standpoint, this ambiguity is compelling. From a human standpoint, it can be exhausting.

Many readers encounter these dynamics first through fiction. Others encounter them through the quiet stories people share when trust allows it—late conversations, confidences offered carefully, moments when someone reveals what life inside a particular workplace or institution was really like. Once you have heard enough of those stories, fiction that revisits the same terrain can feel less like discovery and more like reopening a file cabinet you had carefully closed. Which brings me back to the book club.

I read the novel because I want community. The simple truth is that community is harder to find than it used to be. Reading groups promise something valuable: thoughtful conversation, intellectual engagement, and perhaps the slow formation of friendship. But I realized, as the meeting approached, that attending would likely mean hearing the story again through other people’s lives.

Books like Service often open the door to personal testimony. Readers recognize something in the narrative and begin sharing their own experiences: workplaces where power was abused, moments when they or someone they knew were treated as expendable, stories that have rarely been spoken aloud. Those conversations can be meaningful. They can also be heavy. And I knew, with unusual clarity, that I could not carry any more stories right now. There are seasons in life when we can hold space for others—when we can listen deeply, witness pain, and offer care without feeling overwhelmed. But there are other seasons when the emotional shelves are already full. What I felt was not indifference. It was the opposite. I care too much to pretend I could absorb more. Equally important, I did not yet know the members of this book club well enough to trust that the space would hold me if something surfaced from my own life. Trust grows slowly. It cannot be assumed simply because people share a reading list. So I stayed home.

This is not a criticism of the novel. Service is a serious and thoughtful work that examines the moral ambiguities surrounding power, complicity, and memory. For many readers it will spark valuable conversation. But sometimes the distance between literature and life disappears. When that happens, a book becomes less an object of critique and more a mirror one did not intend to look into. Perhaps the most important lesson I took from this experience has little to do with literary judgment and everything to do with listening to one’s own limits.

We often praise readers for confronting difficult material, for pushing through discomfort in the name of understanding. Yet wisdom sometimes lies in the quieter choice: recognizing when we have already encountered enough of a particular story in real life. The book club will meet again. Community takes time to grow, and I still hope to be part of that process. But this time I listened to a different voice—the one that said it was enough to read the book, and wise not to relive it.

Sometimes the most honest response a reader can offer is also the simplest:

Not this book. Not now.

When Gertrude Stein Starts to Sound Like AI

I’ve been reading Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which traces the strange and shifting reputation of Gertrude Stein after her death. The premise is that Stein never stopped being rewritten. Each generation seems to rediscover her and find a different reason to care. At various moments she has been treated as a central figure of modernist experimentation, a feminist and queer cultural icon, an eccentric salon host in Paris, or simply a famously difficult writer people admire more often than they actually read.

Reading about this long literary afterlife made me curious to revisit Stein again. I’ve read several of her works over the years—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Tender Buttons, and Three Lives—and I remember liking them, even when I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of them. Stein’s writing is peculiar but also oddly pleasurable once you settle into its rhythms. The repetition begins to feel intentional rather than chaotic, and the sentences start to accumulate a kind of momentum.

In the course of reading Malcolm’s book, however, I ran into a familiar claim about Stein: that her work really reveals itself when read aloud. Stein cared deeply about sound. Her prose often moves through repetition, rhythm, and small variations in phrasing that echo like musical motifs. According to this argument, the ear understands something about her writing that silent reading might miss.

So I decided to try listening to Stein.

Within minutes I was irritated.

Not the productive irritation that difficult literature can provoke—the sense that a text is pushing you to read differently. This was something else entirely. Listening to Stein began to feel like listening to AI-generated language. The sentences were grammatically fine. The rhythm was oddly persuasive. But the meaning seemed to drift, circling the same territory again and again without landing anywhere. I found myself thinking, with increasing annoyance: this sounds like AI gibberish.

The reaction surprised me, because my earlier experiences reading Stein had been quite different. When I first read Tender Buttons, I remember enjoying the strangeness of it. The repetition felt playful. The language seemed deliberately dislocated in a way that forced me to notice words themselves rather than simply using them as transparent vehicles for meaning. Even Three Lives, which is far more conventional than Stein’s later experiments, carried that sense of careful attention to rhythm and phrasing.

Listening to Stein, however, produced a completely different experience. After a few minutes I stopped the audio and realized something that had never occurred to me before: every time I had previously read Stein, I had encountered her visually. Her writing on the page looks unusual. Words repeat. Sentences echo one another with slight shifts. Paragraphs form blocks of rhythm rather than conventional narrative development. When reading silently, your eye can move around the page. You can glance back at earlier phrases and notice how they change when they return. The repetition begins to look intentional—almost architectural.

Audio removes that architecture.

When Stein is heard instead of seen, the repetition unfolds in one direction. The listener cannot easily compare phrases or notice how small variations accumulate. Without the visual cues of the page, the pattern disappears and what remains is simply a stream of language that can feel strangely unanchored. What once looked like design begins to sound like drift.

In my case it began to sound like AI.

That comparison may seem unfair to Stein, but it also says something about the moment in which we are now reading modernism. Writers like Stein spent enormous energy experimenting with repetition and syntactic loops because those techniques disrupted the expectations of ordinary prose. Early twentieth-century readers encountered her writing as something radically new. Language itself seemed to behave differently.

Today we live in an environment saturated with generative text. Large language models produce sentences that are fluent and grammatically convincing but often subtly untethered from meaning. The result is a peculiar reading experience: language that sounds right while simultaneously feeling slightly off.

We have all developed a kind of instinct for detecting it.

Listening to Stein through audio triggered that same instinct. The repetition and variation that once seemed like deliberate artistic strategies began to resemble the surface qualities of machine-generated text. Of course the resemblance is only superficial. Stein was composing with extraordinary care. Her sentences were not random or statistical; they were part of a conscious experiment in how language might behave if freed from the usual expectations of narrative.

But without the visual cues of the page, that distinction blurred.

This small experience also made me think differently about Stein’s literary afterlife. Malcolm’s book argues that each generation reinvents Stein according to its own concerns. Critics in the mid-twentieth century situated her firmly inside the story of modernist experimentation. Later scholars emphasized her role in feminist and queer cultural history, often focusing on her life with Alice B. Toklas and the famous Paris salon they shared. Now we may be entering another phase of Stein’s afterlife, one she could never have anticipated. We are reading her in the shadow of artificial intelligence.

The irony is hard to miss. Stein wanted readers to slow down and notice language itself. Her repetitions interrupt the normal flow of reading and force attention back onto the texture of words. Yet in the age of generative text, repetition produces a different reaction. When language loops or drifts, readers may assume a machine is involved. The same linguistic patterns that once signaled radical experimentation can now feel eerily familiar.

My brief audiobook experiment therefore ended quickly. Stein, at least for me, is not a writer to encounter through headphones while doing something else. She requires the page. Her writing depends on seeing how words gather, repeat, and shift across space. Once I returned to reading her that way, the irritation vanished almost immediately. The repetitions regained their shape. What had sounded like meaningless looping began to look again like deliberate pattern.

If Stein has an afterlife in the age of AI, it may lie precisely here. Machines can generate endless streams of fluent language, but they cannot experience the kind of attention Stein demands. Her writing asks readers to slow down, to watch words as they repeat and transform, and to recognize the deliberate human intention behind even the strangest phrase. That kind of attention still belongs to us.

And perhaps that is where Stein’s afterlife now lives—not in audiobooks or algorithms, but in the quiet act of sitting with a page long enough to see what the language is doing.

Objects, Lessons, and Language Play: Reading Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake with Tender Buttons

 Objects, Lessons, and Language Play: Reading Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake with Tender Buttons

For the second month of my slow reading of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, I followed the one-chapter-per-month rhythm recommended by Benjamin McEvoy. The pace continues to feel right. Rather than trying to master the book, I am letting it accumulate slowly, the way sediment gathers in a river.

Alongside each chapter I am also noticing what other texts are already present in my reading life and allowing them to become companion pieces. These pairings are not planned; they emerge from coincidence and curiosity. For Chapter 2, the companion text is Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.

If Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake felt like entering a river of language, Chapter 2 shifts the scene into a schoolroom. The chapter centers on the children of HCE and ALP—particularly the twins Shem and Shaun—along with their lessons, scribblings, and rivalries. Schoolbooks, alphabets, classroom recitations, and juvenile mischief circulate through the text. Yet even here Joyce refuses stability. The language behaves like a pile of exercise books that have been soaked in the river and scattered across the floor. Words blur into each other, lessons become jokes, and authority—especially educational authority—constantly dissolves into play.

Reading this chapter alongside Tender Buttons turns out to be unexpectedly clarifying. Stein’s short prose pieces, organized under the headings “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” dismantle the ordinary relationship between words and things. Instead of describing an object clearly, Stein circles it, repeats it, fractures it, and reassembles it in unexpected ways. A familiar household item becomes linguistically strange. Meaning does not disappear so much as it becomes unstable, forcing the reader to pay attention to rhythm, sound, and pattern rather than straightforward description.

Both Joyce and Stein are working against the assumption that language transparently represents the world. In Tender Buttons, the object becomes an occasion for linguistic experiment. A chair, a plate, or a room is not simply named but re-experienced through repetition and rearrangement. In Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake, something similar happens with the structures of schooling. The alphabet, the lesson, the exercise—these forms that are supposed to produce clarity and discipline—are scrambled into puns, echoes, and playful distortions.

What makes the pairing especially interesting is that both writers take materials associated with childhood or domestic life and use them to challenge literary authority. Stein writes about objects from the everyday interior world—rooms, food, small household things—and transforms them into sites of linguistic exploration. Joyce places the reader in a classroom filled with children’s lessons and scribbles, only to let language overflow those orderly educational forms. In both cases, spaces that might be dismissed as trivial become laboratories for experimentation.

There is also a sonic dimension shared by both texts. Stein’s sentences rely heavily on rhythm and repetition, creating patterns that resemble spoken language or incantation. Joyce’s prose in Finnegans Wake likewise depends on sound—internal rhyme, alliteration, multilingual puns. Reading Stein beside Joyce makes it easier to hear how much of Finnegans Wake operates at the level of the ear rather than the eye.

For me personally, reading Stein alongside Joyce carries another layer of resonance. Years ago, when I was a university student in New Orleans, someone once described my own writing as “Gertrude Stein-esque.” At the time the label was meant as dismissal, but it had the curious effect of sending me directly to Stein’s work. I began reading her partly out of defiance and partly out of curiosity about what that comparison might mean. Returning to Tender Buttons now, decades later, I can see more clearly how Stein’s willingness to disrupt ordinary language created space for other kinds of writing—writing that values repetition, rhythm, and small observations rather than narrative authority.

Placed beside Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake, Tender Buttons becomes less an eccentric modernist artifact and more a companion experiment. Both texts remind the reader that language is not a fixed tool but a field of possibilities. Objects, lessons, rooms, alphabets—these ordinary structures can all be taken apart and rebuilt.

If Chapter 1 of my year with Finnegans Wake began with water—the sea of The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Joyce’s river—then Chapter 2 moves indoors, into classrooms and rooms filled with objects. Yet the underlying impulse remains the same. Both Joyce and Stein treat language not as a stable system but as something alive, something that can be turned, rearranged, and listened to in new ways.

Reading them together makes that playfulness easier to see—and easier to enjoy—as this slow journey through Finnegans Wake continues.

Sea and River: Reading The Waves with Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake

 Sea and River: Reading The Waves with Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake

This year I began reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce after hearing Benjamin McEvoy recommend an unusual approach: reading one chapter per month. The suggestion immediately appealed to me. Finnegans Wake is not a book that rewards speed. It seems designed to resist it. Rather than a narrative to move through efficiently, it feels more like a linguistic landscape—something that invites wandering, re-reading, and long pauses. Approaching the book at the pace of one chapter per month makes the experience feel less like a challenge to overcome and more like a year-long conversation with Joyce’s language.

Alongside each chapter, I have also begun noticing what other books happen to be present in my reading life and allowing them to function as companion texts. These pairings are not planned in advance. They emerge from the serendipity of whatever I am already reading. For the first chapter of Finnegans Wake, the companion text turned out to be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I had begun Woolf’s novel in 2025 and wanted to finish it in 2026, so it was already waiting beside me as I started Joyce.

Reading the openings of these two works together revealed an unexpected resonance: both begin with water. Joyce famously opens Finnegans Wake with a river already in motion—“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…”—a sentence that seems to carry the reader directly into a flowing current of language. The river is not merely a setting but a structural principle. It gathers mythological references, Dublin geography, biblical echoes, nursery rhymes, and fragments of multiple languages into a continuous movement that ultimately loops back upon itself at the end of the book. Water here becomes historical and cyclical, suggesting that language, like the river Liffey, carries the sediments of countless past stories.

Woolf’s opening in The Waves also begins with water, but in a very different register. The novel starts with the rising sun over the sea while waves move rhythmically toward the shore. Throughout the book, brief descriptive passages of the sea and sky alternate with interior monologues spoken by six characters whose lives unfold across the text. In Woolf’s work, water functions less as a carrier of mythic history and more as a marker of time and consciousness. The movement of waves parallels the movement of perception and memory, tracing the slow unfolding of individual lives from childhood to old age.

Reading these two beginnings side by side highlights two distinct modernist experiments. Joyce constructs what might be called a river of language—dense, multilingual, and associative. Words constantly break apart and recombine, and meaning often emerges through sound, pun, or etymological echo rather than through straightforward narrative explanation. Woolf, by contrast, composes something closer to a tide of consciousness. Her language is lyrical but transparent, while the complexity emerges through the shifting arrangement of voices and the gradual layering of temporal experience.

Both writers challenge the authoritative narrative voice that dominated the nineteenth-century novel, yet they do so through different strategies. Joyce multiplies voices until the text resembles a collective dream in which identities blur and historical fragments surface unpredictably. Woolf, on the other hand, carefully orchestrates her six speakers, arranging their monologues almost like movements in a musical composition. Where Joyce floods the page with linguistic abundance, Woolf allows meaning to accumulate through rhythm and repetition.

Reading The Waves alongside the first chapter of Finnegans Wake has helped me approach Joyce with a different posture. Instead of attempting to decode every phrase, I find myself listening for patterns of sound and rhythm, noticing recurring fragments, and allowing passages to drift past with the patience one brings to watching water move. The experience becomes less about solving a puzzle and more about inhabiting a current.

As the first month of a year-long reading journey through Finnegans Wake, this pairing feels like an appropriate beginning. Woolf’s sea and Joyce’s river offer two different visions of movement within modernist writing—two bodies of water that, in their own ways, carry language forward.

Reading Dracula Slowly: Fear, Breath, and the Victorian Internet

I finally read Dracula. I say “finally” because it is one of those classics that seems to exist everywhere in cultural memory but somehow never quite makes its way into one’s actual reading life. I had always assumed the novel would be fairly straightforward—something closer in spirit to the deductive adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: clever, rational, perhaps suspenseful, but ultimately tidy and procedural.

Instead, I found myself reading much more slowly than usual. Not because the book was difficult, but because the suspense would sometimes get under my skin in a way that made me pause. I would be completely absorbed, turning pages, caught in the mounting tension—and then I would need to step away for a while. The atmosphere became almost too vivid. The novel seemed to work not just on the intellect but on the body. In retrospect, that rhythm—reading, pausing, returning—felt strangely appropriate for the book itself.

Dracula unfolds through letters, diary entries, telegrams, ship logs, and newspaper clippings. No single narrator controls the story. Instead, the characters gradually assemble the truth together, piecing together fragments of information that slowly reveal the shape of the threat they face. Reading the novel today, it is hard not to notice how modern this structure feels. These documents move across distances, circulate between people, and accumulate into a shared archive of knowledge.

In some ways, the novel reads like a nineteenth-century information network. Long before digital communication, the characters are already living in a world of fast-moving messages and collaborative documentation. Journals are typed, telegrams arrive with urgent brevity, and phonographs record testimony. Each document becomes part of a growing web of information that eventually allows the group to understand—and confront—Dracula.

What surprised me most, however, was how intimate this form feels. Modern narration often carries the tone of a public square. We read voices that seem to be speaking to everyone and no one at once, shaped by the rhythms of broadcast culture and social media. In Dracula, the letters are usually written to a specific person: a friend, a fiancé, a trusted colleague. There is always a clear “you.” That intimacy changes the experience of reading. The characters are not performing for an audience; they are confiding in someone they trust. Fear, confusion, and wonder enter the narrative in a quieter, more personal register.

The atmosphere of the novel also surprised me. The sections set in Transylvania are breathtaking in the literal sense of the word. They hold the reader in suspension—beauty and dread woven together so tightly that it becomes difficult to separate them. The landscape feels immense and ancient, filled with silence and shadow. Yet the later scenes in London carry their own kind of tension. If Transylvania represents mystery and immensity, London represents coordination. Knowledge begins to accumulate, documents are compared, and clues are aligned as the modern world attempts to organize itself against the unknowable.

And still, even as the information network strengthens, the novel never quite loses its atmosphere of unease. Perhaps that is why the book took me longer to read than I expected. The suspense is not merely about what will happen next; it is about the feeling of moving through uncertainty and gradually realizing that the world may be stranger and more fragile than one first believed.

When I finished the novel, I found myself lingering on the experience rather than rushing on to the next book. Some classics arrive early in our lives as part of school reading lists, while others seem to wait quietly until the right moment. Reading Dracula now, I realized that my earlier assumptions about it had been shaped mostly by its cultural reputation—the countless adaptations, the familiar imagery, the sense that we already “know” the story.

But the original novel has a texture that popular culture rarely captures. It is slower, more atmospheric, and more intimate than its reputation suggests. Its suspense unfolds through mood and correspondence rather than spectacle. And perhaps that is why the reading experience stayed with me. It required a rhythm that modern reading often forgets: immersion, interruption, and return—a kind of breathing with the text.