The Elk and I Breathe Books in 2026
“I think my year-long reading slump is over,” I said to the Elk.
“How so?”
And then I told him about books that I wanted to read, the list that stretches on from one hill of my bookcases to the other. I told him how I was devouring On the Origin of Stories. “I want to read all of Little House on the Prairie again,” I said to him by way of explanation. “And I want to read the Bible in its entirety, to finish the works of Dostoevsky and Dickens.” I flapped my hands. “As you know, I just finished A Christmas Carol, and I was nonplussed by how much I enjoyed it.”
The Elk is a more agreeable and rational creature than I am. He weighs philosophy and history before responding to me or my letters. His big antlers sway gently when he thinks. “Let’s make a list,” he finally agrees. “You love making lists.”
He knows me so well. He knows how I want to read more magazines like The New Yorker and The Paris Review this year, that I am considering subscriptions to those and to World Literature Today because that is my favorite magazine ever. He know that I crave, when I wring my hands over and over again, to write for those publications, too. He knows the scope of my wildest daydreams, how I will actually try and pitch to The Paris Review in the next month or so. And he is patient with me, the way his hooves tap the covers of books that I bounce around from, my attention span weak as a thread pulse.
I flourished a fountain pen, blue as the lazy sky. “Well, we’ll need to read my mother’s favorite books for my essay collection.” Black Beauty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. As I Lay Dying. Hamnet. King Lear. Things Fall Apart. Joseph Campbell. Anne Rice. We’ve got a ways to go.
“Then,” I said, twirling the pen absentmindedly, “I want to read some classics I have never before gotten to.” Jane Eyre. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Moby-Dick. The Shahnameh. The Journey to the West. The Tale of Genji. Don Quixote.
The Elk and I like to talk thus. In our letters to each other, we talk about why I love Dracula more than Frankenstein, and he tells me about his fondness for Anna Akhmatova. We scrawl notes in cheap stick pens in a battered journal, one that is fraying around the edges. Ours is a deep friendship; it goes back to 2006. Twenty years, my friend, twenty years.
I sip my tea — lemon loaf with cream and sugar, one of my favorites — and say, “In terms of modern classics [the Elk and I have agreed that this is anything published after 1900], I need to reread The Call of the Wild this winter, The Book of Disquiet this spring." The tea in its mug swirls. “It’s been so long since I’ve read In Watermelon Sugar, too.”
To my great delight, I am thrilled to float from one book to another. My attention span has always been flimsy, but now I’m inhaling so many great reads that it would be a shame to not tell them to the Elk, who waits patiently at my elbow with his great antlers stacked high with nooks and crannies like the shelves of a library. I’m engrossed in The Count of Monte Cristo, Love and Other Ways of Dying, The Grace of Wild Things. And though I am not liking Howl’s Moving Castle, I am going through it to learn what I can of what to do — and not do — in my own books. There is no point in explaining all of this to the Elk, for he is quite attuned to my every thought, those feeble organisms beached on the banks of my psychosis at times. He never seems to mind the way I trail off my words, like now when I talk about my happiness.
We talk the serious side of things. Namely, the two of us are planning to soon add videos to these blogs. That will have to wait until I can afford a camera, a microphone, and some lights, but it is coming in 2026. Together, we already sketch out some ideas for blogs/vlogs. “It is the natural progression of things,” mused the Elk. Then: “Your tea is getting cold.”
Asnuma, live and squirming instead of just words on a sterile webpage.
My mother, not the Elk, was the first one to suggest this future for Asnuma. She was a devoted fan of Jonna Jinton, and I still feel nostalgic when I watch her videos. In some ways, I think my mother believed in the Elk as strongly as I do, believed in the friendship I have forged with my beloved journal. I hope that the videos, when I get around to making them, are of a quality worthy of her heavenly approval. I do feel that is the right time to branch out with my work a bit.
So, I tell the Elk, I want to read:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Priory of the Orange Tree
Giovanni’s Room
Too Much and Not the Mood
My Perfect Cognate
Silent Spring
Orlando
The Story of the Stone
The Laws of Thought
Philosophical Investigations
Les Miserables
The Lord of the Rings
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
The Elk patted my shoulder with his cloven hoof. “Let’s get to reading.”
