Despite all of my parents' struggles & my own, my life has been good & I have never known the exact horror of uncertainty, how it makes every passing moment, every drink with a friend, every laugh, every bad dance move, every unfinished coffee, precious.

I never imagined that reading would one day become my only way of connecting to the world that I was often prohibited from entering in 2020 and 2021.

The Moon Book became my Bible; I opened it every day. I took notes. I downloaded multiple moon calendar apps. I journaled; I meditated; I built an altar and did spells.

My reading is stubbornly centered on works by women in the 20th century. Whenever I tell someone what I’m reading, no one seems to know what I’m talking about.

At the risk of coming across exactly like the smug shithead I really am (when I'm not pretending to be chill (ugh) so that men will like me), I admit here that I find the premise of a reading goal pretty lame.

What are the ethics of recreating historical figures? Would it be an abuse of a writer’s powers to make them worse than they were in real life? Who gets to define what just representation means here?

When times get hard—and the news, I think it’s fair to say, has sucked of late—my reading, like everyone else’s, gets reactive.

These are stories and essay collections written by and about people who are interested in examining the world. This is what I needed in books this year, so I offer them to you, as a healing balm for all our 2021 wounds.

Moving to a new city during a pandemic likely caused me to read more books than usual this year. I buried myself in books! As the lonely do!

My reading choices this year, more than ever, dig deeper into my interest in what writers are doing, thinking, and living beyond the page.

This year, perhaps more than any other in my adult life, I’ve yearned for narratives that promise big things will happen in the lives of the characters they feature.

Two thousand twenty-one was a year of reading lonely people. I walked around a cold and gray and empty Philadelphia, embittered and lonely and feeling brattily like I was entitled to another life.

Looking back on it now, 2021 was a year that I learned what it meant to not just be a reader, or a writer, but also a literary citizen.

I read Lauren Oyler’s Twitter feed and her novel Fake Accounts, both of which were cutting and cryptic and precisely targeted.

By taking on a uniform, you simultaneously quit thinking about clothes and force the world to deal with you on your own terms.

Sometimes you just happen to be reading the right book—maybe it doesn't happen as often as you'd like, but when it happens, oh my, it happens.

I read with my usual gusto, but I read whatever I wanted, undeterred by worries of frivolity or trendiness, or falling behind, or reading the right (or wrong) authors.

I read books about facing disaster and I read books about transformation and reimagination. This makes sense, I guess, given the history we’re currently living.