It has been a difficult year in reading for me because I have found myself increasingly drawn to reading snippets of news from my phone instead of books, and when that becomes too much for me to handle mentally or emotionally, escaping into cheesy super-hero television shows on the CW.

Reading his words feels like having a mouthful of blackberry hard candies, rich and uncomfortable and complex in all the best of ways.

All I wanted was a literary life — a professional and artistic life defined by the act of creating literature, whether as a writer, a publisher of other writers, and even a curator of writers for live audiences — but achieving a dream simultaneously reveals a void.

Working in a bookshop every day, it’s almost impossible not to slip a book into my pocket on the way out each evening.

This year also marked the first time in more than a decade where I lived in the same town as an independent bookstore -- and never before have I been so perfectly happy to make my wallet just a bit lighter these days.

Both authors are bold and brave when working with time and place. This lets them display some structural features that, from time to time, just make you want to stand up and clap.

Everyone was right: 'Outline' is indeed thrilling in its form and point of view, and it’s a genuinely innovative book. I haven’t been as excited about a novel in a long time.

Adichie's essay swayed me from stasis towards fervor. In the end, she reminds, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” And it doesn’t. A new year begins.

In an industry and community that is overwhelmingly white, just proving that you aren’t racist isn’t going to be enough.

In the moment of reading, I believe, and am changed.

In the context of a government of men, Cercas suggests, real and durable greatness is marked by compromises, trade-offs, disappointments, and missed opportunities, rather than their absence. Not to give away the ending, but maybe politics is more like real life than we'd like to imagine.

The consecutive earthquakes of Brexit and Donald Trump are invariably my two pillars of this garbage fire of a year.

I feel like the grasshopper who sang all summer.

This is the kind of writing that reorganizes thought patterns and social relations.

Last night I dreamt about meeting Curtis Sittenfeld. As I recall, we were both in a small group conversing politely, but not directly to one another, and at one point I threw caution to the wind, grabbed her by the elbow, and said “I just have to tell you that I loooooved Eligible."

But while people like Dorothy Vaughn were now working side by side with whites doing the same work, they would still have to face the discriminatory walk through labyrinthine corridors until they found the washroom with the sign COLORED GIRLS.

When Armistice Days and Veteran Days come around annually, few in the West remember the millions of colonized people who suffered and sacrificed in a war they did not choose.