A Year in Reading: Joseph Cassara

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I find solace knowing that books are still here for us, with the quiet, meditative, and introspective experiences they offer.
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A Year in Reading: Jenny Offill

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The books that stayed with me really had a dazzle to them. Stylistically or intellectually, I needed someone to overpower me and make me pay attention.
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A Year in Reading: Terese Mailhot

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When I gave her eulogy, I made a commitment to keep my life as vivid as she left it and then found myself failing. Life was dull, even with books, which is unlike me.
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A Year in Reading: Oscar Villalon

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The closer you get to 50, the more apparent it is that the window of time you have to get to the books you need to is narrowing like a sclerotic aorta.
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A Year in Reading: Anita Felicelli

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These two lives of mine sat in tension. Why was I reading one thing to talk about, to be part of society, and another thing to experience privately?
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A Year in Reading: Bridgett M. Davis

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I now understood I’d been bereft without knowing it, had missed the intimacy I once had with those characters and that narrator.
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A Year in Reading: Rene Denfeld

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The best years are the ones where I read as much as I write, so I am wrapped in a delicious swirl of story. Here are just a few of the good books I read.
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A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

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I grew suspicious Isenberg was writing a cleverly coded takedown of Trump, but I realized that was unlikely because the book was published five months before the 2016 election.
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

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Three other works that stuck with me this year involved men in trouble, one farcical take on contemporary society and two sly, metaliterary comedies.
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A Year in Reading: Hannah Gersen

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I think this “strange thing” is what must happen to all of us if we wish to address the environmental crisis. We need to get closer to plants and animals, to remember that we are all living on this planet together.
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A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

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I’ve got to be reading something, anything, at all times. I’m like a slobbery Golden Retriever at its dog bowl. More, more, more!
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A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

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This year, with the logic that our social reality is as disturbing and surrealistic as any fabulist gothic, I’ve decided to make an exception for nonfiction by including books on politics.
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A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz

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I stayed in a one-bedroom casita in Santa Fe, spent most of time journaling and meditating and practicing yin yoga at a yoga studio a block away.
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A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rákoš

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I, like you, definitely don’t need to be made more susceptible to the predations of the truly sinister agents of corruption that are at work all around us.
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A Year in Reading: Kaulie Lewis

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Being a part of it has meant admitting to about a dozen things simultaneously, chiefly that I’ve struggled to hold the room in my life for reading.
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A Year in Reading: Grace Loh Prasad

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What a difference it would make if all Americans could imagine what it’s like to be a woman of color.
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A Year in Reading: T Kira Madden

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I let go of any book that lacked sincerity in 2019; I plan to maintain that rule. Still, I’ve never in my life felt more grateful to return to words at the beginning or end of my days.
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A Year in Reading: Beatrice Kilat

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By that I mean that he’s a little practical and a little dreamy, a little horny and a little precious, which is just how I like a person.
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