Reading in Public No. 78: Margin Notes for Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou
On allowing allusions to provide a reading foundation
Welcome to Margin Notes, a new occasional subset of Reading in Pubic. In these newsletters, I will try to make how I read visible how I read by exploring a text, pointing out what I noted and noticed, questions and conclusions I formed, and annotations I took along the way. This is similar to an exercise I experienced in grad school and one I used to do often with my own students. Getting to witness how other people read and trying to articulate my own reading process both transformed my reading, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to do in written form for as long as I’ve been writing this newsletter.
Rather than a cohesive essay or review, Margin Notes will be a sort of snapshot of my thinking process. I may draw some conclusions about what I read, but, more often, I’ll be sharing the questions that pop into my mind, the connections I make between texts, and the ideas that strike my fancy as I read a text. We are more accustomed to getting readers’ fully formed thoughts on a book in the form of an evaluative review or an analytical essay, but I’m equally—if not more so—fascinated by the process that takes a reader from point A to point B as they make their way through a book. So while there will be evaluation and analysis in these posts, they will mostly be a collection of thoughts I thought as I read.
This type of writing is something I’ve wanted to do since starting Reading in Public, but it’s taken me a long time to work up the nerve. In addition to the amount of time posts like these can take, I had some concerns about putting this kind of thing out into the world. It’s a vulnerable position! The things I notice—and inevitable, fail to notice—in my reading will leave plenty of room for criticism; I’m sure to get things wrong, miss important passages, and make silly mistakes. But recently, I’ve reminded myself that that’s the whole point of this exercise: making thinking visible. And each one of us thinks, notices, connects, and reads differently—including making idiosyncratic misreadings.
To that same end, I hesitated because I don’t want to give the impression that I’m sharing the “right answers” about a text or the “right way” to read. These newsletters are meant to be educational, but not instructive. There’s always something to learn for ourselves from learning how others read, and I hope you gain something interesting and useful from these pieces. But I’m not trying to instruct you on how to read, and I don’t pretend to have the right answers or the best ways to process any book. Rather than telling anyone how to read, I want to show you how I read and invite you to tell me more about how you read. We all come to books with different contexts, skills, and interests, and we can gain so much understanding by seeing what stands out to other readers.
While the rest of Reading in Public will remain free, Margin Notes is exclusively for paid subscribers. My plan is to write these in a manner to be read by those who have or haven’t yet read the book I’m covering, unless we’re doing a readalong of the entire book together. The idea is that by glimpsing my reading process and seeing my margin notes, even if you haven’t read the book, you’ll make a connection or take something away about your own reading process.
In today’s post, I will be covering Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou and translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa. While I will touch on the ending of the book, it’s an historical novel in vignettes, so it’s impossible to spoil the plot although you’ll certainly be more interested if you’ve read or are considering reading the book. This is the first post of its kind that I’ve done, so the format may evolve in coming months, but today’s post is divided into sections: Text and Context, Notes and Noticings, Concluding Thoughts, and Questions for You. This post is a long one so it will get cut in your email inbox. For the best experience, open this in a web browser or the Substack app.