By Taylor Portela
Part of the self-care routine I’m building in grad school is finding time to read books for pleasure. Books I’ve read before, books I’ve started but haven’t finished, and books that have patiently waited on my bookshelf for me to open.
I’ve just finished Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and have started Scribe by Alyson Hagy. Here are the rest of the books I hope to read this first year:
Photo by Taylor Portela
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald – unread
• Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf – reread
• Sula by Toni Morrison – reread
• Nadja by Andre Breton – unread
• Nietzsche & Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze – never finished
• Ariel by Sylvia Plath – reread
• Proxies by Brian Blanchfield – reread
• A Several World by Brian Blanchfield – reread
• Amalgamation Schemes by Jared Sexton – never finished
• Incognegro by Frank B. Wilderson III – never finished
• Black and Blur by Fred Moten – unread
• Homegoing by Yaa Guasi – unread
The Minnesota Review 
I my own experience, for what it is worth, rereading a book is generally best left for years later. If you read or start a book at age 18, and then take it up again at 21, you have probably not changed much. If you wait until you are 30, or 50, you will definitely be a different person — and so the book will be different, and probably richer. Besides, putting off rereading Moments of Being, for example, frees up some reading time for Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Even reading one chapter of Mrs. Dalloway is far better than reading none, in my humble opinion. You can always reread the novel when you are Mrs. Dalloway’s age, and that will surely give you a very different perspective.