I gravitate toward writers who have a "project," who are concerned with—and consumed by—the search for something, unraveling a knot of ideas.

Simply put, these are the stories I wish I read growing up in California.

As long as there are authors, translators, publishers large or small committed to the deliberate word deliberately committed to the page, and so many who still need those words on pages, legal or illegal, right, left, or center, we’ll find our feet again.

Reading Levy helped me envision a way of writing myself again into existence, of remaking a home and a life, to visualize it as the adventure I was thrust into.

I started 2021 distressed like everyone on the planet, but also coping with heartbreak. Enough, I decided. I’m tired. I picked up bell hooks, because I needed Feminism-with-a-capital-F

Before this year, I typically read one book at a time. Now I alternate, and I find the trick is to switch from one kind to another: chip away at the long ones while flying through the shorts.

Reading about harm and abuse, reading about injustice and inequality, as fireworks caused my foster dog to curl up with fear in my bedroom closet, seemed an appropriate way to commemorate Independence Day in 2021.

I read Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This in two sessions and wasn't tempted to look at my phone because reading it was like being on the Internet—but a highly refined, dreamy version.

I turned in the final draft of Ghosts to my editor on Jan. 6, mired in a mildly-to-severely disassociated state while I watched news updates about the attacks at the U.S. Capitol, underway just miles away from where I live.

In any week, I’m reading and re-reading some of my favorites, what follows is a list of books that offers no linear progression; it is clustered around obsessions that currently feed my reading life.

While I was exploring new settings and inventing characters and working out the next thing, I read, almost exclusively, mass market paperbacks.

The world is nowhere near normal, or this is the new normal, or it was never normal. I’m not sure, but I’m learning how to return to myself, a writer, a reader.

In Cleveland, the first 30 pages of so many novels. Susan Miller’s tweets. E-mails from my landlord about the mice.

As a new mother, whose body and brain and constitution were being pulled in every direction, I didn’t want to be seen. What the best books do is see you, meet you where you are. I couldn’t do that, not yet.

I’ve been writing my second novel for a year and a half now, starting in May 2020, the peak of the pandemic lockdowns when time was crushed into a colorless smear of minutes, hours, and days.

Throughout these months, I’ve turned to story, as I always do, for advice about life, for models of family and togetherness.

We stopped at the Topaz Internment Camp, where my wife’s family was held during World War II, near the tiny town of Delta, Utah. We found the apocalyptic remnants of one of our country’s great shames.