I read less this year (see: global pandemic and body metamorphosis due to pregnancy), but I still got through 66 books. Not bad for a year that started with an earthquake and ended with a baby.
Rattling around the house in the County Sligo hills, swinging from bouts of paranoia to moments of strange, demented hilarity, a 900-page doorstopper was just what I needed to stay grounded.
I have read more this year than any other, but that doesn’t feel like a triumph. It felt compulsive and escapist in a bad way, regardless of whether the books were good.
Something as infinite as a black screen cannot contain something as infinite as grief. Instead, grief distorts space, time, and language. It insults language. It devours words. When grieving, entire dictionaries dissolve into atmospherically thin air. In short, grief, at its primordial core, is wordless.
I spent the whole year wanting: a better world, a reprieve, a stimulus check, to look at someone’s whole face, to have a drink in a bar, to say things differently, to say things well, to be near. Everything of late has had a hard edge, not just the boundaries of would-be lovers.
At the end of her necessary account is an articulation that sums up not only the dilemmas of our age, but of storytelling as a means of making sense of these momentous times: she admits to looking for stories where she should have been seeing a system. This is the epistemological divide, and one, I worry, our literature has not caught up with.
When I was young my parents enrolled me in a speed-reading course, which was held in what felt like the basement of a used bookstore on a former main street in a town just west of Kansas City.
As I was waiting in line to buy The Complete Gary Lutz it was discovered that some of the books for sale were partially printed upside down. They wouldn’t sell me one of the messed-up books, though I wanted one and said, “No, no, it’s fine, I want one!” so I took home a normal version, from which I read stories occasionally over the course of several months.
This memory feels like premonition of 2020—waiting for something that would allow me to move through the world the way that I originally intended but in the meantime taking in the world in the way that I hadn’t planned.
For most of November, I’ve been wandering around with Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book because I miss my grandmother and grief is also an island weathered by sunshine and storms.
The experiences of male survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were assumed to stand in for all survivors—but women’s experiences in the camps were often signally different from those of men.