Due Date with Ariana Reines
where we ask our favourite WRITERS to fill in a Library Card with the books they have on loan, reserved, lost & found, and on their top shelf.
Inspired by library sections and driven by the curiosity to get to know the books behind our favourite writers, tune in every month as we reveal what titles fill their bookshelves. What they’re currently reading, what they’re going to read next, what vintage classic they can’t get out of their heads and what book is their favourite of all time. Find out on DUE DATE.
Presenting Ariana Reines!
Ariana Reines was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Recent books include The Rose, Wave of Blood, and A Sand Book, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her Obie-winning play TELEPHONE has been staged around the world. Reines has created durational work for Performance Space New York, The Whitney Museum, Stuart Shave Modern Art, & many others. She's the translator of TIQQUN's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl and Jean-Luc Hennig's Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal. In 2020 she founded Invisible College, a study hall for poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.
ON LOAn: What are you currently reading?
Gary Indiana, Do Everything in the Dark; Lucy Ives, Life is Everywhere
I’m reading both of these at the same time which is very out of character for me. They’re kind of a before and after 9/11. I tore through the Gary Indiana first, slowed way down when I had about 50 pages to go, then switched to Lucy and did the same. New York novels are fascinating – some don’t conjure what the city feels like at all, but these do. They’re helping me rediscover memories I’ve felt cut off from.
RESERVED: WHAT ARE YOU excited to read next?
Allen Ginsberg, Ahmerica; Tom Cole, Chimes, Bayo Akomolafe, Sela, Jarett Kobek, Atta, Vi Khi Nao, Fish in Exile, Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, The Greek Caves, E.P. Thomposon, Witness Against the Beast, Mabel Ellsworth Todd, The Thinking Body, Riane Eisler, The Chalice & The Blade
I read somewhere, probably Instagram, that Marilyn Monroe read The Thinking Body twice, and that’s how she created her walk. Dystopia, utopia, geniuses of character and voice, deep time, and visions. Ever since my 9/11 kick, I’m really interested in unusual and dangerous states of mind brought about by urban architecture, which the Ginsberg, Kobeck, and Cole are about (ok I’m kind of reading all of these already….).
LOST & FOUND: WHAT IS A classic YOU loved reading or HAVE recently rediscovered?
Simone Weil, The Lord’s Prayer
I wrote the introduction to this. It’s an extremely brief text, but kind of an atomic distillation of Weil’s theology. She is talismanic to me, terrifying and essential.
TOP SHELF: What’s your favourite book ever?
Wolkstein and Kramer, INANNA: Her Stories and Songs from Sumer
I’ve given this book away and taught it more than any other. I own at least six copies and couldn’t find any of them to take a picture for you. Which is embarrassing. Inanna has everything, including healing properties, a drunken god, robot flies, giving birth in hell, a young woman rejoicing in “her wondrous vulva”, and an excellent sex scene involving copious agricultural metaphors. I will bet you ten thousand dollars that by the end of the 21st century it will be more famous than The Odyssey. It also happens to be older.
There’s one more all-time favorite I want to cite. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. I have lost track of my copy because I read it during a period of intense travel. This novel is unlike anything else I have ever read. It feels like something that was emanated by time itself, almost in the form of a mist. Yourcenar inhabits Rome, inhabits possessive love, inhabits the mind of an emperor in such a beguiling way it completely dislodges your sense of reality, it feels absolutely present and real, more alive than most things in your own reality.
