A Year in Reading: Chloé Cooper Jones

Reading—my most familiar and constant activity—has been more of a struggle for me during the pandemic years. There are the obvious distractions—stress, panic, despair, etc. But less obvious to me was just how communal my reading practice happens to be and so, perhaps paradoxically, these more isolated years have slowed it down a bit. By communal, I mean that, historically, a lot of my reading has been as a student and then as a professor—I’m technically (temporarily?) neither at the moment—and so I’m often consuming a text with the explicit intention of talking with a particular room of people about it. When I paused my academic life to write full time, I did not realize how much I’d miss the experience of moving with my reading from solitary spaces to the full classroom. Also, I often read what my friends were excited about or what they had