I’ve always been a reader, but for me, never was there a year so devoted to books as this one!
Having taken up the helm at the National Book Foundation, much of the year was devoted to reading as many of the longlist, finalist, and winning titles for the National Book Awards . But despite that effort, it’s impossible not to sneak off and do some personal reading too.
In a year with some fairly fraught politics, Jane Mayer’s excellent Dark Money was a beautifully reported book on the many-year efforts of the Koch Brothers (and friends) to empower the radical right and to change American Politics. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted was also a stunner and took a deep look at what housing instability in America looks like (and why). I also spent some time in a book club reading presidential biographies, starting with Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. (I highly recommend this exercise, given the state of the American presidency.) Jesmyn Ward’s compilation of essays on race, The Fire This Time, was a gift. Less explicitly political, Ruth Franklin’s exceptional biography of Shirley Jackson was a highlight of my year. And I re-read a lot of James Baldwin this year, because I needed it.
On the fiction side, I dug Nell Zink’s Nicotine, the amazing Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Greg Jackson’s Prodigals (seriously, the story “Wagner in the Desert” is a tiny miracle), and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun.
The true sparkler of my year, however, was C.E. Morgan’s epic The Sport of Kings, which everyone thinks is about horse racing, when it’s really about everything: love, race, legacy, family, justice, poverty, and American inequality. On top of that, it’s one of the most gorgeous books I’ve read in many years. When I finished the book, I immediately called a friend and said “this book is precisely why I do the work I do.”
As the year ends, old habits kick in, and I’m wading through old favorites. My (mostly) annual rereading of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is as disconcerting and comforting as ever, with beautiful Lily Bart still giving it her best (and worst) shot and losing every time. I always get a little sad this time of year, and poetry is just the thing for that, Rita Dove, Richard Siken, C.D. Wright, Nick Flynn always do the trick.
In the end, there was so much I didn’t get to. I’ll be traveling quite a lot next year and the hope is that I’ll have more time to bang through all that I missed in 2017. Especially the giant stack of books from independent presses and books written by friends sitting on my nightstand. And more essays.
More from A Year in Reading 2016
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
