Lately, I’ve tried to read books published more than five years ago, and this year, I found a lot of pleasure in dwelling in the backlist—though I made time for a few new books.
The book is a blister. It’s fun to touch, mess with, and you eventually want to see it explode. But when it does, it’s more of a mess than you expected, hurts, and takes a while to heal.
In many ways, 2021 seemed just as strange and unmoored as 2020. Of course, I wish I had read more—though that’s the case even during my most prolific reading years.
This list, culled to 10 entries, is a history of care and tenderness these past several months. It traces a web of connections against the distances of the moment.
My fairly new home of Portland threads through this note—which in editing looks more like an unintentional literary travelogue—so I’ll start my reflection on standout reads of the past year locally with Mat Johnson’s Loving Day.
Now that my novel has sold, I feel ready to take risks as I haven’t since my early 20s. I want more books, more sex, more writing, more love. There is so much more to life than protecting myself from—and I hate to say this—myself.
In the face of so many tangible enclosures produced through the pandemic, my reading life this year has been attuned to affective openings, to women writers making space for each other and for other possible worlds.
By the end of 2020, it was clear that I would be living in Mexico. And thus began my odyssey of binge watching mostly Spanish language telenovelas to accelerate my language skills.
It has been, in some ways, one of the most bountiful years of my life, and in others, the absolute loneliest. My lonelinesses have always been treated best by books.
My library is not a collection of precious objects but of precious, thoughts-made-real. My library is not the safe-box repository for western culture. These are not sacred texts; this is digestible material that amounts to food.
