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Friends,
This is the is the sixth and final episode* in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. In other words, tools that don’t merely deaden us in the frantic pursuit of survival, but that assist us in nourishing ourselves, each other, and the world, all together.

This time, the theme is READ
and my guest is author, tarot reader, and teacher ALEXANDER CHEE.

Reading is what got me here, got me resilient, got me more compassionate, more successful, happier, more thoughtful, more inventive, more durable… So why would I, or you, or anyone who reads, give reading less importance in the scheme of things when we’re considering how to live in this year of challenges?

And when we talk about reading, we mean books, but also tarot cards.

The act of reading – whether tarot card or book – is a mystery.  Reading is the engagement with the symbols that shows us what lies beyond our normal conception of space and time. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of the novel wasn’t too far off as a precursor to the rise in spiritualism: the beyond opens up to more beyond.

Reading is always an altered state of consciousness. There is no stable “normal” conscious state, but when a good writer brings you in to their style the tracing of a new pathway can be shocking, undoing the reality you’re used to. Furthermore when we read novels, we’re also creating images in conjunction with the mysterious author, a distant, yet present being. And sometimes, an author is dead, reaching out from a different kingdom of existence

When I read tarot, unlike with novels, the pictures are there. But the reading shows us how they fit in with what is known, what is feared, what is anticipated. In other words, when I read tarot, or have it read for me, I’m the assigning time to it. I give the cards a temporal command. 

We say to the tarot, use your landscapes, your mountains and rivers and fields and castles and churches, and their inhabitants, to tell me something about this time of life, or this coming time of life, or how to interpret what has happened when…

Alexander Chee is the author of three books, most recently his essay collection, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel; and also two novels, Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night. Alex’s essay, “The Querent”, is about reading tarot, and it’s great. You can also find it in How To Write An Autobiographical Novel.

At the end of this episode, the exercise is a little different. First we do a reading for you, the listener, in the world and its anxieties and challenges. We consider what they are, how to approach them, and how not to approach them.

Then, Alex and I do a reading for what you could be reading next… We draw a tarot card and let it give book recommendations.

Here are the books mentioned on this episode.

A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
Power by Linda Hogan
Wind from an Enemy Sky by Darcy McNickle
The Lord Won’t Mind (and other novels) by Gordon Merrick
Narrow Rooms by James Purdy
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf
The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf by Christa Wolf
Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives by Ray Young Bear

And here’s a link to all of Alex’s stuff, and here’s a link to his site (which is less up to date, but still has some extras).
Finally, here’s the short essay I wrote on reading everyday things for the Lamda Literary Review.

*Here’s the first episode of the series, ENVISION with ROB HOPKINS, the second, PRAY with BASTIAAN BAAN, the third, CONNECT with DEAN SPADE, and the fourth, DIE with CAITLIN DOUGHTY, and the fifth, PEACEKEEP with CHEYNEY RYAN.