What I was reading in 2019

January
Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green

February
The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
American Gods, Neil Gaiman

March
The Deeper the Water, The Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina
Brunelleschi’s Dome, Ross King
Severance, Ling Ma
The Painted Word, Tom Wolf

April
Rocket Boys, Homer Hickham

May
Achille’s Song, Madeline Miller
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Department of Speculation, Jenny Offil
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Soula, Toni Morrison

June
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
There, There, Tommy Orange
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, Kim Fu

July
Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli
Summer, Edith Wharton

August
Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney

September
Normal People, Sally Rooney
Cherry, Nico Walker
The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwan
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

October
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Good Times are Killing Me, Lynda Barry
Crudo, Olivia Laing

November
Gentrifier, Schlichtman, Patch & Hill
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

A man caught my eye as I was racing to finish Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave on an uptown D train and either said aloud “Isn’t she incredible?” or said it with his eyes and my own widened and I nodded furiously but went right back to reading, desperate to finish the book. A repeat of 2018 and Angela Davis, but maybe a little less sad. This guy didn’t seem to want to talk as much. 2019 was a year of haunting books  – The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, The Sheltering Sky, Severance, Cherry, Conversations with Friends, Crudo – just real fucking bummers. There’s something in me that recoils from so many of those books, even though I also read most of them so quickly and so hungrily.

And then there were the beautiful-sad-beautiful – Sula and Gilead, and Song of Solomon. The aching sort of books that make you sad but grateful to have spent time with them. (Sad, but not bummers, you know?) Among them too, Lost Children Archive, and There, There. The unexpectedly delightful – Brunelleschi’s Dome, One Hundred Years of Solitude (I had started it once earlier in the year and couldn’t find my way and then all of a sudden it was love. Two women stopped me on two different occasions to tell me how much they loved it too). It was a weird, vaguely haunted year for reading, 2019. Something steeped in sadness about the whole affair. If only I had known what was coming.

What I was reading in 2018

January
The Crying of Lot 49 , Thomas Pynchon
Silk Parachute, John McPhee

February
White Rage, Carol Anderson
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib

March/April/May
Pet Sematary, Stephen King
A lot of mysteries involving a cat detective
The Jessica Darling books, on a loop

June
Draft No. 4, John McPhee
The Cheese Monkeys, Chip Kidd

July
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee
Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell Jr.

August
The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead
The Body, Stephen King
A Bad Idea I’m About to Do, Chris Gethard
Yes Please, Amy Poehler

September/October/November
The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem
The Idiot, Elif Batuman
Night Moves, Jessica Hopper
”The Real Inspector Hound”, Tom Stoppard

December
Circe, Madeline Miller

Wow, typing that was time travel. I remember reading Mrs. Bridge on freezing cold subway 1 train cars, traveling at weird times to avoid rush hour, tucked into corner seats, upper arm pressing into the cold metal of the car. I remember reading Colossus of New York, also on the 1 train, heart hammer hammer hammering with love and recognition, yes, New York, yes, love, yes, this city, back home, at last. Again with The Disappointment Artist – Hoyt Street! home! … while at the same time my parents were packing up my childhood home. I remember reading The Idiot and feeling light and airy and bamboozled, laughing with delight over this book that was so weird and so funny and thinking how long it had been since I felt like that. In fact 2018 was spangled with books that – and I don’t think this is overstating it – changed things for me. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Hanif Abdurraqib, my god, what a writer and thinker), How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (not a week goes by – 2 years later – that I don’t think of Alexander Chee’s Roses, or his foxes, his fortunes), White Rage, which changed the way I understood US history and my own poor and limited understanding of it, which I still think about most weeks,The Body, which I had looked for for years as a teenager, and then, my god again, John McPhee. My favorite writer and I only met his work two years ago and now it’s the sort of thing where I buy any of his books on sight, I don’t care if I’m interested in the subject matter or the form, I just want to read what he writes. And then, then – Circe. That book changed something so deep in me and I have pressed it into the hands of so many people in my life and just – the idea of a woman who gets to grow into herself again and again and again, ever-changing, ever learning, shedding men like snakeskin…

2018 was the year I moved back to New York from Chicago. The year Geebie, died. She died the day before I moved, and so I washed my bathroom floors for the last time, heart broken, and panicked about late movers with half a mind, flew halfway across the country and then the next day turned around and drove almost the same distance back. It was the year I lived in Manhattan, in an apartment with no cooking gas, but plenty of leaks which in turn brought plenty of cockroaches. The year my parents were forced to leave their home of nearly 30 years, my childhood and only home. The year I crossed the East River again and again hauling pieces of my past in ikea bags and backpacks, crying softly on the 2/3 and 1. The year I turned 27. It was a year of so much, but even in the middle of being overwhelmed again and again all these books found me, worked their way inside me. Books I still think about so often it’s like I read them months ago, not years.

What I was reading in September and October

Books Read

September
Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

October
Swing Time, Zadie Smith

After the flurry of reading in August, I expected to be reading more. I was expecting the momentum to do the work, but it turns out that it doesn't really work that way. I picked up a handful of other books but didn't make the time to sink into them. Again, coming back to Nick Hornby, but sometimes it's not the books that are at fault, it's the readers. 

The night I finished Freedom is a Constant Struggle, in a Starbucks that was near but not that near my apartment, an older white man waved at me to get my attention from the table diagonal to mine. “That Angela Davis” he said “what’s she saying these days?” “Oh, um. She’s talking about Palestine” I replied. And then he nodded and shared a little bit about his experience with her decades ago. I don’t remember what exactly he said, only that I couldn’t tell if he was feeling negatively about her, or thought she was full of it, or thought I was full of it, to be a white woman reading Angela Davis in a coffee shop. And then I left, maybe to go to therapy or maybe to just go home, nervous with the unexpectedness of it all. Looking back, I think he was just lonely; I think he liked Angela Davis; I think he wanted to talk. And I couldn’t or wouldn’t give it to him in that moment. And that’s a story about social anxiety.

When I was reading Homegoing on the south-bound Red line platform, a woman approached me to tell me how much she loved it. I waved my copy and gabbled back “I just started but I think I’ll definitely be recommending it to people!” and then she walked away. That’s also a story about social anxiety.

What I was reading in November

Books Read

Show Your Work, Austin Kleon
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green 

What I was reading in August

Books Read

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
Today will be Different, Maria Semple
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell

I took two days off work in August, but I was in New York and surrounded by love, and actually stopped working at 5 or 5:30 when I was working, so it felt like more. I also read so much so quickly this month and was amazed by how much longer and fuller the time felt. Commonwealth was my 6:00am airport treat to myself, a reward for having made it through the craziest work period of the year, and I bought it expecting it to maybe keep me entertained if I was awake for any of the flight. Instead, two middle seats and Patchett's propulsive story kept me awake all through both flights, and was all I was thinking about when a stranger occupied my conversation for the hour and a half commute to my parents' home from the airport. The annoyance I felt while talking to this stranger wasn't related to the invasion of my space or the expectation for social skills and interest (which tend to be the dominant flavors of my annoyance when talking to strangers)–it was related to the interruption of my reading time. I read it in two days, and don't remember the last book I read like that. I gave it to my Mom and told her to give it to my Dad and then my sister. There was something about the families, something about the structure, something about the writing. This book was a reminder of a former self, the girl who lost evenings and weekends in books and then sought escape in them a few years later. It was a reminder of the power and love that made me want to study literature in the first place. And it led to a flurry of reading. 

Today will be Different is also about family and estrangement and the ways we act out the pains of being a sibling and a child and a parent, although with a completely different tone. My whole family boarded the Where'd you go, Bernadette? train at various points over the past year or two and this book was a gift for my dad, who couldn't ever get into it the same way and warned me as much when I picked it up from his dresser during my visit. I could see his point – it's a weaker story than Bernadette, and it felt like maybe the biggest problem was that it was rushed to print. It's hastily resolved, the story is a little saggy and maps a little too evenly to Bernadette. Still, I read the whole thing and enjoyed it, so why throw too many stones. 

From Semple, it was a jump to Atwood. I had read Handmaid's Tale for the second-worst class of my college career and maybe hadn't read all of it then in my pettiness. I certainly didn't remember huge chunks of the story. I read this because my sister had just finished it and I wanted to talk to her about it, but it put me in bad moods whenever I finished reading for the day/evening and I didn't really want to talk about it. It felt so banal to say "well yep, this feels relevant and terrifying" every time we talked about it, but that's what we kept saying. Since finishing it, I've read a few interviews with Atwood, most tied to the television adaptation of the book but still focusing on this question of what's different from when you wrote the book to now? I'm in a bad mood just thinking about it now, so I'll focus on this – Atwood is so skilled at documenting Offred's documentation of the minute details of her life. She's so skilled at capturing the feeling of being stifled by sharing the obsessive documentation of ceilings and furniture. The numbness of repetition, the loss of identity through isolation. I could feel my body getting stiffer, more anxious, more afraid of drawing attention as I read. The crummy college class and my crummy college self didn't do this story justice the first time around. 

I read Take the Cannoli because I had heard the radio version of one of the stories. Sarah Vowell used to be a big contributor to This American Life and her story about taking a road trip with her sister to follow the Trail of Tears is a big favorite – of the staff too. I heard the story during the TAL 500th episode celebration, where they pulled out their favorite moments. If you listen to the story, I think you'll be able to identify it pretty easily. But there's a lot more to Take the Cannoli, and Vowell is a skilled storyteller and it went by very quickly. A friend asked me about what I was reading and I tried to explain it and came up with "well, it's a collection of essays about one woman's understanding of what it is to be American?" which is not untrue, but could also be used to describe a lot of other books. But Vowell does it so well and she's so funny and dark and gets at the absurdities of America and the pain and horror and joy. She was recently on Nerdette, and talked about another quintessentially American moment she experienced and it felt related to Take the Cannoli and her entire body of work. 

What are the themes of this month? Family? Generational shifts and similarities? America's brutality and America's gifts? Eh, okay, sure. It was just nice to have a month (and a couple of days) to just be hungry to read and not worry about connections or carry-overs. I imagine that will come, but in the moment it was nice to just reach for one book after another.