A Year in Reading: Aatif Rashid

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In previous years, I’ve prided myself in reading a hundred books a year. This year that will certainly not be the case. But despite that, I think I’ve had a more profound interaction with books this year—the pandemic and the resulting extra time spent inside my apartment has helped me understand why I value reading so much.
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A Year in Reading: Jenny Bhatt

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For 2020, given what I had imagined the year would entail, my word-of-the-year choice had been “renewal.”
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A Year in Reading: Adam Dalva

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Anyone who teaches creative writing knows that our students bring us to the most implausible worlds—in one class, you might experience a sword fight on Mars, a break-up in a college dorm, and an admission that changes an identity forever. In an impossible time, my students used their creativity to get me out. They saved me, this year, because they reminded me what reading alone can do.
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A Year in Reading: Lysley Tenorio

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The people of this novel are complicated, sympathetic, infuriating, and unforgettable.
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Year In Reading: Anne K. Yoder

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The result is the novelistic love child of David Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks and David Bowie’s concept album Outside; it’s truly just as strange and wonderful and hallucinatory.
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A Year in Reading: Nick Moran

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Milk piqued my interest because at the time my daughter was five months old. When people notice one blue car on the road, they see every blue car on the road. When I opened my fridge every few hours, I primed myself for distraction.
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A Year in Reading: Kaulie Lewis

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Appropriate, then, that the book is as much about stripping-away, about mourning, preserving, and letting go, as it is about travel; it’s full of characters caught by some mysterious force and thrown out of their patterns and routines, a freshly relatable experience.
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Year in Reading: Hannah Gersen

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There was a moment when I was convinced that I was going to spend the rest of 2020 reading Ripley novels.
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A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz

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“We Are Too Big for This House” inspired me to rethink form, how to work with time and space within a narrative, and interweave art criticism into a story. It’s a poem I’ll return to again and again.
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A Year in Reading: Claire Cameron

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This is one tiny slice of what the pandemic has taken, a bet, a glance, working from intuition, spontaneous laughter with a stranger, feeling close to someone I’ll never see again. I miss the chance to navigate other people and places in the old world, one that was less controlled and contained.
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A Year in Reading: Shruti Swamy

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I read that one doubled-masked on BART, the train bearing me back to the city. It was a bright, gold day, late summer, and from the windows of the train the view of the white container cranes standing at attention beside the glistening bay—a view I have always loved—remained unchanged, it seemed to me.
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Year in Reading: Jennifer Acker

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I first read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard in college in a fiction workshop taught by Anita Shreve, who once, with the best of intentions, lectured our class on the “banality” of the subjects we chose to write about, and who, when her most recent novel was selected by the Oprah book club shortly after our class ended, never, to my knowledge, returned to the classroom again.
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A Year in Reading: Destiny O. Birdsong

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In a year when I too am coming to terms with my body’s history and limits, its future and fearless strengths, each of these pieces gave me space to mourn and laugh, to honor and to plan.
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A Year in Reading: Marie-Helene Bertino

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Both books imagine then endanger tender, delicate bodies and listen only to their own strange pulses against the universe.
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A Year in Reading: Caroline Kim

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Just when I had convinced myself that writing was pointless and a waste of time, Packer reminded me in the most powerful way that I was just plain wrong.
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