Two thousand twenty-one was a year of reading lonely people. I walked around a cold and gray and empty Philadelphia, embittered and lonely and feeling brattily like I was entitled to another life.
I read with my usual gusto, but I read whatever I wanted, undeterred by worries of frivolity or trendiness, or falling behind, or reading the right (or wrong) authors.
I read books about facing disaster and I read books about transformation and reimagination. This makes sense, I guess, given the history we’re currently living.
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.