Molly Young is the GOAT Book Recommender

An interview about becoming a dominant ping-pong player (and some other stuff)

Graphic design courtesy of Thomas Euyang

Molly Young tried being a critic for a while. She was quite good at it. The best book critic in the game, IMO. But she found that trying to critique something that someone had spent many years working on was unfair to the writer and a painful experience — especially when she generally had five days from beginning the book to turning in the review. It’s something I experience frequently when going through new music promos. The nature of the biz necessitates listening to a lot of music all the time, and moving on from someone’s work so flippantly is one of the worst parts of my job. There aren’t really answers to this dilemma. I’m merely musing here, people.

While Molly figures out what, exactly, she wants to do next, she’ll surely have her pick of opportunities. Her newsletter, Read Like The Wind, became such a success at New York Magazine that she was hired by The New York Times as a critic and to continue the newsletter. When she departed, they kept the name, but don’t worry…she has no shortage of good ideas for book recommendation concepts. Her current entity? “So you think you can read.” 10/10. That project is available via her Substack, which I thoroughly endorse.

I first encountered Molly’s work as a young adult, and it offered a fresh perspective on the literary world. It was less stuffy, less self-serious, less joyless than what I assumed it to be. Perhaps that’s on me for not digging deeply enough into the art form to discover what I actually liked, but I never really had any interest in it until I discovered Molly’s work. I will read anything she recommends, and her longform journalism is always a delight.

I caught up with Molly because I wanted to discuss things like how she’s so good at recommending books; her love of surfing; and bringing humor to everything she writes. I don’t think books will ever be cool again, but if they are, it’s because there are people like Molly Young spreading the good word. The good news? They will continue to do so regardless. Check out our conversation below, and I’ve also included a little treat. I asked Molly to recommend three books that best encapsulate her as a person. I also included three recommendations that capture who I think Molly is as a person. Now you have six new books to buy and read. Happy?

Molly’s Picks:

Barbara Browning — The Gift

Janet Malcolm — The Crime of Sheila McGough

Matt Groening — Work is Hell

Will’s Picks:

William Kennedy — Legs

Thomas McGuane — The Sporting Club

Willa Cather — The Professor’s House

What’s your day to day like now that you’re no longer full-time at The New York Times?

Molly Young: Well, I’m still figuring that out, but I wake up at seven, get the kid ready for school, which is actually daycare because she’s only 16 months old. They’re not learning much yet. Then coffee and I work on whatever I’m working on until 2:00 PM probably. Then I go get her, and then we go to the park or the waterpark, or do activities until the end of the day. Then after she’s down, I get a little more work done and then hang out with my husband.

So it’s work and kid and that’s it?

MY: With plenty of room for recreation, of course, because that’s the sugar of life. I always make time to surf or garden or do whatever extracurricular I’m mainlining at the moment.

I don’t know how much you can talk about what you’re doing next, but do you want to be a critic at a publication or are you done with that?

MY: I definitely don’t want to be a critic at any publication. One thing I discovered in doing that role and trying it out was that I don’t really have any interest in being an arbiter of things for people. It turns out I don’t really care what anyone reads. I’m happy to write about books, and I’m happy to write about books that I love. In fact, I really enjoy it. The job at a lot of these big organs is to inhale everything that’s coming through the pipeline and then extract a few specimens that feel — for whatever reason institutionally — necessary to cover. Then, we give people a yellow or red or green light. That’s a really limited and uncreative view of the job description, but in the end, it does come down to that, or at least it did for me.

I think other people are much, much better at it and much more imaginatively equipped for the role of critic. But in the end, I wasn’t really interested in being a stoplight. I’m still a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, I’m still doing the features and stuff. I’ve always loved going on adventures and doing investigations and things. But I am taking a little bit of time to just write my own shit. I’m trying to swear less…write my own stuff and hang out more with the child. It feels really good.

You are the GOAT recommender in my opinion, and others are starting to jack your style with esoteric, very thoughtful RIYLs. Why do you think you’re so good at coming up with these recs?

MY: First of all, I’m so glad that people are doing it. It’s a great format. Second, I can’t take credit for the element of ‘read this if you like that.’ When I was a teenager, I was constantly on this message board called I Love Music. There are a lot of people I meet who were also there, whose usernames I connect to them. It’s a moment of mutual recognition and mortification about our past selves. So there was always a recommendation angle, ‘if you like this…’ That was a figure of speech on that message board. I don’t know if it originates there or not, probably not. But in any case, that’s where I stole it from and I just find it incredibly helpful because there’s just a shorthand for, ‘If you like X, you might like Y.’ It’s been said before, but I think there’s a lot of desire for recommendations that aren’t devised by an algorithm. It’s as simple as something devised by a person who has read extremely widely and deeply. That happens to be what I spent almost my entire life to this point doing. I’m a well of resources. There are other people who can provide the same with music or other art forms.

When did you realize that books were your thing?

MY: When my consumption of them was forcibly limited by adults. As a child you learn that forbidden goods are always the most tantalizing. It was at some point in the early grades when books were taken away from me during recess because I would sit on a shady bench reading instead of playing with the other children that I first became addicted. It escalated from there.

I didn’t pick up a book until my second semester of senior year of high school. I’ve spent the next — how old am I now — 14 years catching up and just trying to read as much as possible because I felt like I was so behind. It’s exciting, but it’s also horrifying how many books I’ll never read.

MY: It is horrifying! But the same thing is true for me. I spent the next however many years catching up on socializing.

Together, we could make one competent human being. This is more of a practical question for someone that wants to do book reviews. What’s your process like? Do you read twice? How do you take notes?

MY: When I was reviewing weekly, that’s a book every five days. There were also other duties, so it was a really quick turnaround. One of the problems is I’m a really slow reader, and I always read a book twice. There are some critics who can rip through a book once, and their recall is good enough that they can both experience and analyze the book simultaneously, which I cannot do. I would need to read once through just for a general sense of the book itself and then a second time for more of a mechanical read through to figure out what the author was trying to do and how they were doing it. I would always have a sense on the first reading of whether or not I thought a book was successful. The second reading was to actually answer that question and come up with a persuasive argument to justify what was a hazy opinion. I would take a lot of notes. I really did write the book reviews in the process of reading them. I would annotate throughout, then type up all my annotations, generally edit them, delete the ones that were stupid, pick out the ones that had an insight, and then rearrange them. That was the review. I kind of wrote them in real time as I was reading.

What’s your preferred method for writing?

MY: I use these notebooks. This one’s pretty big, big enough that I feel conspicuously crazy when I take it out in public; also because my handwriting’s very small. It definitely emits a crazy person vibe.

[Molly proceeds to show me what her handwriting looks like, and it’s the most aesthetically pleasing thing I’ve ever seen].

I take a ruler and I divide each page into three columns so that my eye doesn’t have to travel too far across a column. Maybe because I’ve reached a certain age where eccentricity is more acceptable to comment upon, sometimes in public a person will comment on the notebook and how insane it looks, which has made me question whether I should do it more privately. It starts some fun conversations. I write by hand because it forces me to write more slowly and it ends up embedding some of the editing process in the writing. I find it more efficient than writing on a computer because the built-in friction forces me to pre-digest the thought a bit more. Even though I end up having to then type it up, it’s in a more final form.

Who makes the notebooks?

MY: The notebooks themselves are from Emilio Braga. It’s a Portuguese family run business that makes beautiful notebooks. The shipping’s kind of expensive in Portugal, so I have to order them in bulk. I do a yearly purchase, which feels very 18th century gentlemen — my yearly notebook purchase. A huge box arrives and they come with pencils, which is also nice. It’s important to splash out on a primary tool or toolkit that you use. I think that’s a good way to spend a bit of money because it’s something that you’re using every day. If you get pleasure out of the feel of the paper and the colors and the binding and all of that, it adds a little something.

Do you write in the books too, or are you purely in the notebook?

MY: I write in the books. I’m a heavy annotator.

Does leisure reading exist for you?

MY: It’s all leisure reading, baby. Even when I was reviewing a book, I had to think about it as something I was doing recreationally to trick myself into that mindset, Something that happens with any legacy media outlet, but especially with The Times, is that often when writers contribute to the times, it’s like they put on this ill-fitting stiff starched costume and then write very stiffly. They write in a gray palette. A lot of my former colleagues who are editors would then have to go to the writer and say, ‘Loosen up. It’s cool. You don’t have to project this institutional voice. We want you to bring your own voice to The Times.’ There’s something about the bulk and history of that institution that can make people a little starchy in their writing. In order to avoid that too much, I had to pretend that I was writing these things only for an audience that consisted of my friends. In the edit, it could be pulled back and made a little more formal. You can’t make something less formal in the edit. It tends not to work that way.

Do you have a book in you? Do you write fiction?

MY: I’ve got so many shitty novels in drawers. I haven’t landed on the one that I’m going to subject the public to yet, but it’s coming. There are a lot of writers who didn’t publish their first novel until they were in their late sixties or seventies.

Is it something that you work on pretty consistently

MY: No, I dip in and out. I find fiction something that is…I’m curious if you agree or disagree. I find with most kinds of writing that I can discipline myself into creating output. With fiction, applying pressure results only in a cruddy product. I just ease into it and if it’s flowing, it’s flowing. If it’s not, I don’t force it.

Then I just end up not doing anything for a long time. Part of the routine, I think, is tricking your mind that it can come up with ideas every day. It takes a discipline I don’t necessarily have, especially when I spend all day at my computer anyways. Writing is generally the last thing I want to do. But I think that it’s important to be in the practice of, even when you think you don’t have anything worth writing, if you spend an hour and get a good sentence, it’s worth it. Even if you get nothing that’s better than not doing it at all. It’s a lot easier said than done, but that’s where I’m at right now.

MY: That was pretty convincing.

I do like that idea of writing by hand. It feels more intentional. When I’m on a laptop and I set a goal of 500 words or something, I can just breeze through it and come away with nothing worth keeping.

MY: I talked about this once before, I forget where, but I always think that with writing or with any kind of intellectual activity, there’s a soft version and a hard version. I’m always trying to get myself into the mode of soft thinking versus hard thinking. Hard thinking is when you’re under pressure and chugging coffee and staring at a text or staring at a computer screen. Soft thinking is when you’re on a walk and you just naturally have an idea, or, in my case, when I’m writing by hand and the feeling of writing makes my mind forget that it’s thinking. From there, maybe something interesting will come out just a little more flowy and sensual.

Reading for a living is really amazing, but what’s one thing about it that isn’t as pleasant as people may think?

MY: One thing that’s unavoidably not just unpleasant but devastating is that when I was reviewing on a weekly basis, I had five days to apply to a work that someone else had toiled on for years. That’s unfair, bordering on cruel. I could never reconcile that. I would not want to write something and have it subjected to that limited of a timeframe.

That’s actually why I stopped reviewing music. I would have to dispose of someone’s life’s work in two and a half minutes because I have a thousand music promos to go through. It just feels evil.

MY: As a critic, I always had what I thought was a correct evaluation of my importance, which was not very. I don’t really think criticism should sway whether or not someone consumes a work of art or produces a work of art. I think it’s helpful in a different way, but artists really care about what critics think. We see this all the time. They care way too much. I shouldn’t say they care way too much, but they care enough that they deserve someone who will give their work serious and sustained attention. It’s just impossible commercially. That’s just not the marketplace we have.

It’s a landscape that’s pretty devastating all around. Substack-wise, how’s it going? Could you make a living off of it if you did it all the time?

MY: Oh God, no. But I’m also not a machine. I don’t produce quote-unquote content. I would say I’m careful to the point of timidity about what I subject people to. I’m a slow writer and a slow thinker, and Substack rewards quicker, take-ier writing. I certainly could not fit my writing into a model that would produce any sort of sustainable income, but I do really enjoy having it as an outlet that’s mostly under my own terms. I do avoid looking at the Substack feed. It’s a swamp of awfulness, and I don’t why there isn’t an option to turn it off. I wish I didn’t have to see it. I wish I could just only see people whose work I follow instead of random stuff piped in that tortures my eyeballs.

Let’s talk surfing. You’re from the Bay Area. Did you learn growing up?

MY: Yeah, I learned when I was a kid in a town called Bolinas, which is north of San Francisco. It has a very beginner friendly wave, although I would say not a beginner friendly culture. We lived there, so luckily I was allowed to surf there, unlike non-locals who were, I would say, discouraged from interloping with various enforcement techniques, some of them violent. Then I stopped surfing for decades. I moved to the East Coast and for whatever reason, wasn’t aware that there was surfing on the East Coast. I was also focused on other things. Then I picked it back up when I was in my late twenties, when I got a car in New York. I had access to a car finally, so I could get myself out to Rockaway, which is the closest surf break. I bought a used wetsuit — which would test the limits of some people’s hygiene standards — and a Craigslist surfboard and just got right back on the horse.

Do you mostly surf in the Rockaways now?

MY: Yeah, mostly. We will drive around and also travel a bit, but Rockaway is really great, especially in the winter. It gets cranking, as the Australians say.

What’s the coolest place you’ve been to surf?

MY: There’s a place in Peru called Chicama that is one of the longest lefts in the world. I’ve also been to the other longest left, which is called Pavones in Costa Rica. I dunno if I could compare the two. They’re both just really effing long, but it looks like you’ve landed on the moon because it’s this sort of sandblasted, windy, cliffy, almost colorless beach. I remember maybe two cursory palm trees there, and the rest is just a really long wave and a lot of beige colored expanses. I would go back there again in a heartbeat. It was surfing on Mars.

I just looked and it’s two miles long!

MY: I never stayed on a wave for two miles, but I remember the people with whom I was surfing were complaining about getting knee pain because they were on the wave for so long that their knees gave out. I was with a lot of old men. I will say that it might’ve been an old man problem.

What’s your relationship to the Bay Area now?

MY: I will always love it. It’s so beautiful. Whenever I go back there, I’m shocked that it’s a place where any innovation ever got accomplished because it’s such a naturally comfortable and temperate climate that a person could hang out there. I would say there’s no kind of natural adversarial condition that you find that usually leads to problems being solved or inventions being invented. It’s just very comfortable and a scenic environment. I’m always surprised by that. It also feels very complacent. It was an extremely neutral place to grow up. I was neither in love with my environment nor harassed by it. It was just quite easy. The temperature range is like 50 to 70 degrees. You’re never hot or cold. It’s a good metaphor.

Do you have any other hobbies?

MY: I’m currently in between hobbies I would say, or I’m in a phase where I’m enjoying my hobbies but not pursuing improvement in any of them. I’m waiting for my next obsession to hit. The more demanding my work is, the more hobbying I do because I need that active idleness it provides.

What are some you’re enjoying now?

MY: Embroidery, studying Spanish, baking bread, gardening, always surfing. I might get back into ping-pong. I was really heavily pursuing ping-pong, and I recently went and played at Ocean’s Eight, that underground giant ping-pong and billiards emporium on Flatbush. I met someone there and we played 14 games and I got shellacked. I did not win a single game. I’m pretty good. I’m not great, but I’m pretty good. Now that I’m talking about it, I’m getting all excited. I’m getting agitated. That ignited the hunger to master and dominate. I want to make ping-pong my bitch. Maybe that’s the next one.