A Year in Reading: Esmé Weijun Wang

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My year in reading has been both soothing and discomfiting, and that feels absolutely appropriate.
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A Year in Reading: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

So much of that book reminds me that the brightness of a welcoming new year is brief, that there is certainly a darkness that we’ll have to survive again.

A Year in Reading: Tana French

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I think this is a big part of the joy of discovering a really great book: you know that, even when you finish the last page, you’re not done. There’s more in there, waiting for you to come back and find it.
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A Year in Reading: Tess Malone

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Yes, nothing happened, Yanagihara doesn’t understand pronouns, and the ending was infuriating, but I couldn’t remember the last time a book had completely consumed me like that.
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A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

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The election of Donald Trump on a wave of white aggrievement changed the way I read A Country Road, a Tree, as I suspect it will change the way I read and understand everything in the years to come.
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A Year in Reading: Jacob Lambert

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What better way to distance myself from Donald Trump’s noxiousness than to read about an eerily quiet, snowed-in hotel, written decades before the terms 'basket of deplorables' and 'nasty woman' entered the vernacular?
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A Year In Reading: Nick Moran

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Consider me your alien man-slug, obsessively slinking deeper down into the cavern of insanity, fixated only on complete submergence into all things Sunshine.
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A Year in Reading: Sonya Chung

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The central question Paisner asks is, What happens when you are carried into a nether realm of anything-goes, and your loved ones are not willing to come along with you?
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

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In one section, a series of nude women bathe in green water, in blue water, in communal or private tubs, posed in foot baths or sticking their arms in an octopus-like contraption of pipes and funnels. What Whitmanian raptures, or hygienic tips, does the surrounding text reveal?
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A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

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Lew Archer’s assessments of women — “Legs still good. Mouth still good.” — continued to rankle, and I began to collect these instances…for what, I am not yet sure. Maybe as a reminder that this way of seeing females is historical, at least half a century old. It is also our inheritance. And it persists.
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A Year in Reading: Caille Millner

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The Paris that explodes with life on these pages is neither chic nor intellectual -- it’s scrappy, ornery, and dangerous, but it’s also a place of intimacy and wild possibility.
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A Year in Reading: Tony Tulathimutte

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You can't unread it, but you will reread it.
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A Year in Reading: Claire-Louise Bennett

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I have been a terrible reader this year, demanding the impossible — I wanted to experience the same tumult and sting of feelings I encountered when I read classic books for the first time, around the age of 16.
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A Year in Reading: Sofia Samatar

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This was a year of books of marvelous disappearance.
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A Year in Reading: Chigozie Obioma

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The prose is composed and has the energy of a restless dancer, one whom you can not tire from watching even late into the night.
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A Year in Reading: Stephen Dodson

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As I was reading, I was thinking that anyone interested in the intellectual life of the 19th century would profit from this book, but having finished it, I think anyone interested in intellectual life, period, should get it.
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A Year in Reading: 2016

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The entries have a measure of fear and grief, yes. They are about reckoning with the past, and preparing for the future. They are also full of beauty, full of sensitivity, full of intelligence, full of curiosity and care. They are about dissolving in someone else’s consciousness. About sharing suffering. About taking a break. About falling in love.
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Year in Reading Outro

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Year in Reading reminds me of that cinematic device where the camera slowly backs away from the characters we’ve been following until it’s looking at them from outside their window, and then back farther still until you see into their neighbors’ windows as well, and farther still to show a whole building of occupied windows, and then a whole city, until you are looking at hundreds of little scenes in hundreds of little windows.
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