Three Books that Will Transport You

I’m going through a phase lately where almost everything reminds me of “Adam’s Curse,” by William Butler Yeats. The poem is about how our most worthwhile pursuits—things like art, love, and beauty—often seem to demand a measure of toil. Or, as a woman in the poem wistfully puts it, how “we must labour to be beautiful.” The speaker reflects that “I strove / To love you in the old high way of love.” He sounds tired from the effort.Then I read my colleague Hanif Abdurraqib’s gorgeous essay about our collective longing for inconvenience, in which he discusses a friend who “wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way,” meaning without using a dating app. I thought immediately, “The curse!” Abdurraqib’s point, though, appears to be that the curse might be a blessing in disguise, or at least that