I celebrated my liberation from writing with Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro’s newest novel about a near-human doll who aspires to human sentience and autonomy.
I became interested in plants during the pandemic, first uncertainly, then with a frenzy that has led to credit card debt and conversations with a spouse I imagine are similar to other conversations with spouses where one of the spouses is trying to hide something.
My purest reading pleasure of the year was my first stab at the work of Percival Everett, the gifted, prolific, genre-bending author of some 30 works of fiction.
At about the time, as a child, I learned my parents could die at any minute (and so could I, but that was beside the point), I became obsessed with time, especially since I learned it passes.
This spring, I became involved in a fence dispute with a neighbor. I have decided to transmute any lingering resentment into literary channels, and thus my year in reading focuses on fences literal and metaphorical.
Despite all of my parents' struggles & my own, my life has been good & I have never known the exact horror of uncertainty, how it makes every passing moment, every drink with a friend, every laugh, every bad dance move, every unfinished coffee, precious.
The Moon Book became my Bible; I opened it every day. I took notes. I downloaded multiple moon calendar apps. I journaled; I meditated; I built an altar and did spells.
My reading is stubbornly centered on works by women in the 20th century. Whenever I tell someone what I’m reading, no one seems to know what I’m talking about.
At the risk of coming across exactly like the smug shithead I really am (when I'm not pretending to be chill (ugh) so that men will like me), I admit here that I find the premise of a reading goal pretty lame.
What are the ethics of recreating historical figures? Would it be an abuse of a writer’s powers to make them worse than they were in real life? Who gets to define what just representation means here?
These are stories and essay collections written by and about people who are interested in examining the world. This is what I needed in books this year, so I offer them to you, as a healing balm for all our 2021 wounds.
This year, perhaps more than any other in my adult life, I’ve yearned for narratives that promise big things will happen in the lives of the characters they feature.