

AEWCH 288: HOW TO LIVE IN 2025: READ with ALEXANDER CHEE
Early Encounters with Language
- Conner Habib read the dictionary as a teen to feel closer to his awakening sexuality.
- Reading the word "penis" intensified something real outside of him.
Reading and Altered States
- Reading style affects consciousness, going beyond empathy.
- Tracing an author's thinking creates new pathways in the reader's mind.
Intense Encounters
- Alexander Chee aims for reader absorption through sensory language, echoing Annie Dillard's writing style.
- Krista Wolf describes reading as intensifying our engagement with life, not as escapism.

















































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 ALEXANDER CHEE.
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 challeneges. 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... We draw a tarot card and let it give book recommendations.
Alex 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.