The year had a surreal tinge. I travelled more than I had in a while, and this lent my days the mixed-up pleasure and terror of dislocation. I went to the Swiss Alps and ate cheese. I went to World of Coca Cola in Atlanta and drank soda until I felt sick. I went on TV and blinked into the bright lights. And then, back at home in Oberlin, Ohio, I went to class and talked to students about semi-colons—sometimes while wearing a mask, and sometimes not. Always there was the upside-down feeling of life returned to “normal,” though the pandemic has changed everything and new disasters are constant. Reading has been a way to hold my mind steady. Because I published my debut novel this year (Eleutheria), and will be putting out a story collection next year (The Last Catastrophe), I’ve been extra tuned in to the landscape of new books. But I read backlist books and classics as well. I mainlined audiobooks and Speechified-PDFs; I read short stories aloud to my beloved on a rocky beach in Maine; in bed, I held books above my face and read their pages like the underside of a small roof. I let the feelings provoked by imaginary worlds mingle with the upside-down feelings provoked by the world we live in. Which is all to say: to make sense of this surreal year, I’ve organized my reading into categories. I may be a Sagittarius sun, but I’m a Virgo moon. Here is what I’ve been putting into my eyes and ears, and what I’ve been talking about to anyone who will listen (and some folks who won’t).
Books with language that cuts like a knife:
- Quotients – Tracy O’Neill
- The Ash Family – Molly Dektar
Books that were not what I expected based on the jacket copy, but that I still enjoyed:
- The Swimmers – Julie Otsuka
- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Books in which science is causing people problems:
- Real Life – Brandon Taylor
- The Museum of Human History – Rebekah Bergman
Books that were structurally unsettling (both literally and figuratively):
- The Wrong End of the Telescope – Rabih Alameddine
Books that broke open my ice-cold heart and made me shed a tear:
- No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
- How High We Go In the Dark – Sequoia Nagamatsu
Books that take the form of one long diagrammed sentence:
- The Sentence – Matthew Baker
Books that offer useful advice, such as how to re-write a novel draft, or how to attend a sex party, or how to disrupt the oil and gas industry to save our planet from imminent destruction via climate change:
- Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts – Matt Bell
- Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Live, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy – Rachel Krantz
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline – Andreas Malm
Books that offer a vision for what it might mean to rebuild society after the world is destroyed by climate change:
- The Great Transition – Nick Fuller Googins
Books that enter the multiverse:
- End of the World House – Adrienne Celt
- Another Now – Yanis Varoufakis
- The Amateurs – Liz Harmer
- Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
Books that made me hungry:
- The Thick and the Lean – Chana Porter
Books that seem to be about a fixation on a type of bird, but that are really about something else:
- Family of Origin – CJ Hauser
- Brood – Jackie Polzin
Books that are disturbing and also compulsively readable:
- The School for Good Mothers – Jessamine Chan
- Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler
Books that involve love stories with shocking twists:
- Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
- You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty – Akwaeke Emezi
Books that had been on my list for a minute because everyone said they were really good and—lo and behold—they were really good:
- Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters
- My Autobiography of Carson McCullers – Jenn Shapland
Books that feel haunted:
- The Man Who Could Move Clouds – Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- The Circle That Fits – Kevin Lichty
- Names for Light: A Family History – Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Books that are set in the olden days, but that have a lot to say about our present times:
- Outlawed – Anna North
- Forbidden City – Vanessa Hua
- Palmares – Gayl Jones
Books that are collections about many things—including bat extermination, accidental dog deaths, and cigarette smoking—but that also possess a singular vision:
- Rainbow Rainbow – Lydia Conklin
- The Runaway Restaurant – Tessa Yang
- A Manual for How to Love Us – Erin Slaughter
- The Flounder – John Fulton
- Mother/land – Ananda Lima
- Night of the Living Rez – Morgan Talty
- The Islands – Dionne Irving
Books that I found hard to categorize, but that I emphatically recommend:
- damn near might still be what it is – marcus scott williams
