A Year in Reading: Martha Southgate

Let’s face it.  2016 sucked.  It will go down as one of the cruddiest years in the 50 or so that I’ve walked the earth.

It started sucking right away, with the death of one of my favorite musicians, David Bowie, on Jan. 10, and the death of one of my favorite poets, C.D. Wright, two days later.  Maybe it’s not fair to call Bowie’s Blackstar a literary achievement, but it’s an act of deep hubris and generosity and fearlessness that I aspire to as a novelist.  So it’s on my list.  So too is the first of C.D. Wright’s posthumous collections of poetry,  Shallcross, which shows her at the height of her astonishing powers, a book that helps me grieve and shakes me up at the same time.

In February, Peter Straub, one of my literary heroes, put out a collection of his selected stories, Interior Darkness, which I recommend to anyone who thinks the “New Weird” is a new thing. I also discovered the cartoonist Michael DeForge, whose new graphic novel, Big Kids, is a trippy, disturbing, utterly original coming-of-age tale that is still haunting me today.

Also in February: Umberto Eco and Harper Lee died. “Uptown Funk” won a Grammy.

In March, there were primaries,  and I read Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot,  a dazzling and inventive novel about orphans and ghosts and swindlers and religious fanatics. I also read Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal, also about orphans and ghosts and swindlers and religious fanatics.  It was good but upsetting in many many ways.  That Thomas Frank is too cynical!, I thought to myself, hopefully.

In April, Prince died.   

Prince? Died?  2016, could you be more sadistic?

So I read some poetry, which sometimes helps: The Big Book of Exit Strategies by Jamaal May, who is one of my favorite younger poets; The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay, which has an amazing long poem about the childhood of Neil deGrasse Tyson; Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a very painful and sad book by Ocean Vuong.

Then, I immersed myself in The People in the Castle, selected “strange stories” by Joan Aiken, published by the wonderful Small Beer Press, with an introduction by Kelly Link, and Aiken’s tales were a kind of balm for troubled times.  Another balm was the novel Rich & Pretty by my former student Rumaan Alam, which is so funny and beautifully written and precisely described I almost forgot how depressed I was getting.

Summer came at last, and 2016 immediately killed off Muhammad Ali, just to show us it meant business.  There was a convention in my home town of Cleveland which I was trying to ignore,  so I read A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey Ford, whom Joyce Carol Oates calls “…a beautifully disorienting writer, a poet  in an unclassifiable genre…,” and I decided that Jeffrey Ford is an important figure who needs to be recognized more.  I read Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams, who is another one of my idols, and I love that she’s still so weird and crazy, after all these years.

Another of my former students, Sam Allingham, sent me his new book of stories, The Great American Songbook, and it is so good!  He is super-talented and gives me hope for the future!

And a kind acquaintance, Jacob M. Appel, sent me his new book of stories, Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana, and it was also really good, very Grace Paley and smart and wise (he’s a psychiatrist and a lawyer and a professor and has, I kid you not, seven master’s degrees), and then I realized that I was supposed to blurb his book and I screwed up and forgot to do it, so I was ashamed. I’m sorry, Jacob. Your book is awesome.

And then it was August. I read The Fire This Time, an anthology of essays about race, edited by the brilliant Jesmyn Ward; I read In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson. I had a panic attack, and I got some medication — not a moment too soon, because 2016 then decided to take Gene Wilder, and if it wasn’t for Clonazepam I’d still be watching YouTube clips from Young Frankenstein and Willie Wonka, singing along with “Pure Imagination” and weeping, weeping.

Afterwards, I spent a good part of the fall rereading a YA fantasy series by Garth Nix. It was a retreat of sorts,  I guess.

One of my fondest memories is reading with my two sons, which we did all through their childhood. They loved fantasy series. Yes, we read all the Harry Potter books, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus books. The Chronicles of Narnia. 

One series that we were particularly fond of was Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy. We listened to them in the car on audiobook: read by Tim Curry in a rich, plummy, intensely funny and felt performance.  We were mesmerized by the adventures of Sabriel, the girl necromancer who inherits the heavy weight of her father’s obligation to protect the world from the Dead; her half-sister, Lirael, a lonely librarian who goes on a journey with her magical companion,  The Disreputable Dog, finds that she is the only one who can save the world from evil. There is also Mogget, a powerful  magical creature who has been imprisoned in the body of a house cat. (Tim Curry’s performance of Mogget is a particular hammy delight.)

In any case, reading these books with my kids was an intense, formative experience, and I was excited to learn that Nix had a new book in the series that was coming out in October.  I prepared for it by listening to the entire oeuvre — about 50 hours of audio — and it lent me a crutch to hobble on through our hideous American Autumn. Reading these books again, along with the new one, Goldenhand,  brought back a certain kind of joy,  a certain kind of honest excitement, to return again to this wide, richly imagined world that Nix has created with such breadth and texture. I got to relive those times I had with my kids, which is not an insignificant thing. My boys are now 25- and 26-year-old men, but for a time, reading this book, I was able to commune with the children they once were.

I was also able to remember the way that certain kinds of books could help in a dark time — I remembered the kid I once was, living in a difficult and abusive and violent family situation — and how books may have saved me.

I worry that this last bit seems stupid and childish and cowardly?

But so what? I lifted out of the dream of those books a sliver of faith in bravery and honesty and courage, and a hope that evil won’t win in the end.  I could use the reminder.

More from A Year in Reading 2016

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Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

In Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X trilogy, characters grow unhinged and obsessed. One undergoes a psychosis so fully that he physically morphs into a massive, slug-like creature wholly consumed with the task of writing on cavern walls with a glow-in-the-dark, living “ink.” The trilogy is fantastic not only in its plotting and characterization, but also in its depiction of this particular kind of creeping madness — this transformation from mundane to alien — and how that transformation begins gradually, then hastens, and becomes permanent. It’s striking how believable VanderMeer makes it seem. You read and think to yourself, could this happen to me?

Well, yes.

Consider: Three years ago I vowed to only read books based on, written in, or otherwise concerning the state of Florida. (I’ve mentioned this before.) It started out quaint enough. I worked my way through Peter Matthiessen, John D.MacDonald, Thomas McGuane, Carl Hiaasen, Padgett Powell, Charles Willeford, and almost all of Joy Williams. I got a Key West-themed bookmark and savored Elizabeth Bishop’s Florida poems. I sought out recommendations from friends, and that’s how I discovered Jennine Capó Crucet, Craig Pittman, and Nick Vagnoni.

My to-read pile soon warranted its own shelf, and that shelf soon annexed others. Now I have a Florida bookcase, and certain shelves within that Florida bookcase are home to works on certain Floridian sub-themes: football (inarguably the best in the country!), nature (arguably the best in the country!), and politics (inarguably the worst in the country!).

Tchotchkes have accumulated. I have a staple remover that looks like an alligator’s mouth; I have a backscratcher that looks like an alligator’s claw. My refrigerator has a lot of magnets featuring anthropomorphic suns. (Question: Why do anthropomorphic suns always wear sunglasses?) A few months back, I began a series of paintings based on Florida’s wildlife. I hadn’t painted in more than a decade, but suddenly I had the itch.

Florida’s crept into my spinal column — slithered in like an invasive boa constrictor — and coiled itself around my brainstem. I start each day with an email round-up of Florida’s news headlines. I end most days with a different one. I imagine Florida cinched around my medulla, throbbing once to let me know there’s a book about the state’s foreclosure crisis, or secreting sucrotic refinery byproduct to let me know Dave Barry’s got a new book out. (It wasn’t as good as Pittman’s.)

To return to the VanderMeer analogy: consider me your alien man-slug, obsessively slinking deeper down into the cavern of insanity, fixated only on complete submergence into all things Sunshine. Much like how people don’t so much inhabit Florida as they bruise her, an interest in Florida leaves visible marks as well.

Fortunately, Florida as a concept inspires a lot of works for me to read, and Florida as an incubator of talent produces a lot of creative people. I’ve had little trouble finding new things to read. While I’ve gone through most of the well-known books, I’m now happy to investigate the deeper cuts. Everybody knows about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, but how many have read Don Blanding’s Floridays? People the world over are interested in the Everglades, but how many would willingly read a crappy e-book written by something no less Floridian: a C-grade club promoter? How many of you would read Burt Reynolds’s memoir solely because he went to Florida State University?

I’m mostly unashamed to say: I would, and I have.

By now, it may be hard to take me seriously, but hang on. Less well-known Florida works aren’t all bad. There are rabbits in the muck if you’re willing to chase them down. The carcasses of boars and headless goats wash ashore with the tides, but so does Cafe Bustelo. And while I’d argue that sifting through the filth to get to the treasure heightens your enjoyment of those riches (and probably also builds character), I realize not everyone has the time or inclination to consume so indiscriminately. Therefore, what follows is a list of the three best lesser-known Florida-related books I’ve read this year. Enjoy!

Naked in Garden Hills by Harry Crews. Determining Crews’s finest Florida novel is a conversation best had with a well-read friend over a couple drinks, preferably in a public place just in case tempers do flare to the point where witnesses might be needed. I won’t try to do that here, but I submit that Naked in Garden Hills is the Crews novel that’s most representative of Florida, or at least the qualities we’ve come to accept as particularly Floridian: unsettling strangeness and capitalism’s worst effects. Set in a weird, sunken town built on an abandoned phosphate pit and populated by all sorts of bizarre characters — one is reminded, in a way, of the “Humbug” X-Files episode — Naked in Garden Hills tracks the forsaken also-rans left behind after corporations leech the life out of a place and leave only its husk behind.

Nine Island by Jane Alison. Sex is essential to Miami, but Alison’s treatment is wholly distinct from the more typical, desirous leer of authors like Tom Wolfe. Nine Island concerns an older, divorced woman living alone in a Miami Beach high-rise, determined to find happiness, but at times uncertain of her ability to do so. It interrogates the relationships between solitude and loneliness, sexual desire and actual sex, and youth and wisdom. It’s a delight. I took three of Alison’s writing courses years ago at the University of Miami, and in one of them she had us read Susan Minot’s excellent story, “Lust,” in which a woman matter-of-factly catalogs her sexual partners. Her voice is fascinating: both playful and bleak; simultaneously celebrating conquest while acknowledging the complicated, often painful feelings wrought from the pursuit and consummation of desire. Toward the end, that voice shifts from first to the second person, and with that shift the speaker’s lessons gleaned from years of her own sexual activity are transformed into universal prescriptions — personal memories turned to generalized ache and forlorn warning. In Nine Island, Alison’s taken elements of “Lust” and not only stretched them out, but reoriented them — taken a young woman’s premature world-weariness and transferred it to a woman farther along in life, with more experience under her belt and less time for self-pity.

Eight Miami Poets from Jai Alai Books. As a rule, every New York Times article about Miami is absolute trash (and now that it’s Art Basel week, it’s doubly true). I believed that even before they ran that condescending opinion piece last year. Indeed, I’ve come to expect a level of dismissal from all New York-based publications when it comes to evaluations of Miami’s cultural scene. Perhaps it’s jealousy? Miami is much prettier than New York, and there’s no denying it smells better. Yet even still, I was unprepared for a blithe statement quoted by Elizabeth Kolbert in her otherwise interesting New Yorker article about climate change’s effects on Magic City. The line, spoken by a Miami resident (who should know better!) was: “I’m sure if we had poets, they’d be writing about the swallowing of Miami Beach by the sea.” Man, what are you talking about!? Miami has tons of poetry; it has an entire month dedicated to it! In fact, as Exhibit A in the case against this man, I offer as evidence Jai Alai Books’s terrific anthology, Eight Miami Poets, featuring the work of Miami-Dade County-based writers. Topics covered: opioid addiction, palmetto bugs, and, yes, the existential threat of sea-level rise. I rest my case.

More from A Year in Reading 2016

Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005