Lately, I’ve tried to read books published more than five years ago, and this year, I found a lot of pleasure in dwelling in the backlist—though I made time for a few new books.
The book is a blister. It’s fun to touch, mess with, and you eventually want to see it explode. But when it does, it’s more of a mess than you expected, hurts, and takes a while to heal.
In many ways, 2021 seemed just as strange and unmoored as 2020. Of course, I wish I had read more—though that’s the case even during my most prolific reading years.
This list, culled to 10 entries, is a history of care and tenderness these past several months. It traces a web of connections against the distances of the moment.
My fairly new home of Portland threads through this note—which in editing looks more like an unintentional literary travelogue—so I’ll start my reflection on standout reads of the past year locally with Mat Johnson’s Loving Day.
Now that my novel has sold, I feel ready to take risks as I haven’t since my early 20s. I want more books, more sex, more writing, more love. There is so much more to life than protecting myself from—and I hate to say this—myself.
In the face of so many tangible enclosures produced through the pandemic, my reading life this year has been attuned to affective openings, to women writers making space for each other and for other possible worlds.
By the end of 2020, it was clear that I would be living in Mexico. And thus began my odyssey of binge watching mostly Spanish language telenovelas to accelerate my language skills.
It has been, in some ways, one of the most bountiful years of my life, and in others, the absolute loneliest. My lonelinesses have always been treated best by books.
My library is not a collection of precious objects but of precious, thoughts-made-real. My library is not the safe-box repository for western culture. These are not sacred texts; this is digestible material that amounts to food.
I celebrated my liberation from writing with Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro’s newest novel about a near-human doll who aspires to human sentience and autonomy.
I became interested in plants during the pandemic, first uncertainly, then with a frenzy that has led to credit card debt and conversations with a spouse I imagine are similar to other conversations with spouses where one of the spouses is trying to hide something.
My purest reading pleasure of the year was my first stab at the work of Percival Everett, the gifted, prolific, genre-bending author of some 30 works of fiction.
At about the time, as a child, I learned my parents could die at any minute (and so could I, but that was beside the point), I became obsessed with time, especially since I learned it passes.
This spring, I became involved in a fence dispute with a neighbor. I have decided to transmute any lingering resentment into literary channels, and thus my year in reading focuses on fences literal and metaphorical.
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.