At this particular moment, I am completely smitten with Jill Lepore’s history of America - what a rare masterwork of rigorous scholarship with a poetic sensibility - but I am barely a quarter through, so I’d be cheating if I counted it as read. I read multiple books each week and have no qualms about abandoning what fails to captivate me, so I tend to love just about everything I finish. Currently among my anti-tsundoku: “Time Travel,” by James Gleick, “Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,” by Alan Lightman, “ Little Panic,” by Amanda Stern, “ Inheritance,” by Dani Shapiro, and an exhibition catalog - which, in her case, is part poetry and part philosophy - by Ann Hamilton. Of the piles that inevitably accumulate in every room of my house, friends’ books I have recently read and loved tower nearest the bed - part synonym and part antonym to the lovely Japanese concept of tsundoku, the guilt-pile of books acquired with the intention of reading but left unread. I do tend to keep a rotating selection of longtime favorites near or in it, to dip into before sleep - “The Little Prince” (which I reread at least once a year every year, and somehow find new wisdom and pertinence to whatever I am going through at the moment), “The Lives of the Heart,” by Jane Hirshfield, “Hope in the Dark,” by Rebecca Solnit, Thoreau’s diaries, “How the Universe Got Its Spots,” by Janna Levin. I don’t have a nightstand per se - my bedroom is rather ascetic, with only a bed nestled between the constellation-painted walls. The author of “Figuring” (and the brain behind the Brain Pickings website) likes how children’s books speak “a language of absolute sincerity, so deliciously countercultural in our age of cynicism.”

Popova figuring