A Year in Reading: Martha Anne Toll

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The drama! The agony! The misogyny! The biting social commentary! The pathos!
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A Year in Reading: Mamta Chaudhry

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At a time when I’m housebound and only my imagination is free to roam, it is head-spinning to read the phrase, “if our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary” and wonder if in our ceaseless rush forward, these are days, too, that will be indelibly etched in our minds.
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A Year in Reading: Davey Davis

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If the world had its way, trans writers would only produce journeys, and two of the most interesting books I read in 2020 wouldn’t exist.
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A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

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I’d been out of the hospital following (let’s call it) treatment for COVID-19 about a month. My hospital ward of 50 patients had one oxygen concentrator. Despite my blood-oxygen saturation levels of 90%, that device wasn’t coming my way anytime soon. I checked myself out and went home.
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A Year in Reading: Vanessa Veselka

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I have been lucky where others haven’t, but because I am a human, I don’t feel spared. This may also be because I work at a nursing home workers’ union and the wrongness of what we do to poor people is on full display.
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A Year in Reading: Sejal Shah

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Reading in the bathtub helped me get through many difficult times and years: since my twenties, it's been a reliable way to self-soothe.
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A Year in Reading: Silvia Killingsworth

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I was worried at first it would be too sexy for me, but what I loved was how unsexily domestic it got. (That's me: unsexily domestic.)
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A Year in Reading: Joseph Lee

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I probably read more student writing than anything else this year and I’m thankful for every single line of my students’ brilliant essays and poems. They write with so much hope and openness.
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Year in Reading: Katherine Hill

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Reckless love affairs all over mid-century Europe, while a baby sucked my breast.
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A Year in Reading: Eloisa Amezcua

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There were three new and new-to-me books of poems that unexpectedly broke something in me despite my resistance to picking up unfamiliar texts, and risking being thrust further into the emotional precariousness of 2020.
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A Year in Reading: Chelsea Bieker

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I still needed to connect to other artists even though I could not see them in person. I needed to support local bookstores, and I needed language that was not my own in a desperate sort of way.
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A Year in Reading: Adam Wilson

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Aerosols aren’t the concern of a brain in a vat.
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A Year in Reading: Mahogany L. Browne

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It’s been a long year coming, and these books are in preparation for my continued healing, my large and unforgiving living.
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A Year in Reading: Jacqueline Krass

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I’ve thought a lot about this comment in the last several months of isolation – probably too much.
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A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling

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I realize that every time I write a Year in Reading I’m undergoing some psychic melodrama.
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A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

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This was the year I finally, belatedly, decided to figure out why people make such a fuss about Joy Williams.
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A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

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I should state for the record that I already vibrate at a sympathetic frequency with this novel, bursting into unaccountable tears every fifteen pages or so--and at different places each time.
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A Year in Reading: Thomas Beckwith

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Look, I drank too much this year.
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