I don’t know how to think about the passage of time except in cliché — pieces completed, leases signed, commutes commuted, lessons taught, moments Instagrammed — but recollecting years in terms of books read, books loved feels more vital than trite. A bookshelf marks time in the same way seasons do, or the way that old blog posts tell us who we were then, those people in photos laughing at jokes no one’s heard in years.
This year, I read books mostly on the recommendation of friends; despite that, each title I finished seemed somehow appropriate to what was happening, to me and in the world. While I can’t recall all of their names, I could probably tell you the things I absorbed from their pages. Here are the best ones I remember.
There was I Think I’m in Friend-Love with You, by Yumi Sakugawa, which I read twice because it was so beautiful in its illustrations and its evocation of totally consuming friendship; and then later, I read Lit, Mary Karr’s third memoir, which thrilled me with its electrifying description of substance abuse. I loved Michael W. Clune’s heroin memoir, White Out, for its chaotic and careening prose — “Dope gives me a new, dope body. And the way the world looks from deep inside the dope body! From high atop the white tower. The world. It would break your human heart to see it.” — and his second memoir, Gamelife, for the same reason. Ben Lerner’s 10:04 was brilliant in its plotting and conceit, and I enjoyed it so much I lent it to a friend impulsively over glasses of champagne.
I left my copy of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts with a person I love, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with books that completely understand the subject. I read Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson, in its entirety, drunk on different trains. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, on the other hand, I read entirely on my phone in a bed that was temporarily mine. I was in motion when I read Eileen Myles’s Inferno, which I consumed between leases and between the subway stops that cover the distance from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
I read a galley of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s stunning (and now National Book Award-winning) Between the World and Me in a frantic afternoon, and finished it, in tears, by sunset. I didn’t Instagram that view, but I did post a picture of the book. It got 21 likes, and I was a different person then.
More from A Year in Reading 2015
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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