We live in an ugly era, full of people trying to build community and others who are attempting to shoot community in the face one round at a time. Like so many other Americans, I got hate crimed this year. Some asshole threw a sharp object at my leg when I was on the last mile of my daily run. After whatever the fuck it was made contact with my leg, he shouted “run nigger run.” After I spent a suitable amount of time ripping on him for his unoriginality (can’t the racists invent a new racial slur?) I found myself most drawn to books with ugly emotions in them. I wanted to read about desperate people. People who made bad decisions and reveled in them. People who just couldn’t stop fucking up. People to whom fucked up things had happened and who felt like processing those fucked up things in a fucked up way.
Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson was a perfect trip through the head of a burnt out Afro-Latina lawyer who rejects her family and best friend Jane and makes jokes about her childhood trauma. It’s funny and irreverent about the shit its narrator has been through, and that irreverence made it feel like Johnson reinvented trauma writing. Mona, in the novel Mona by Pola Oloixarac, deals with a violent act by taking drugs and visiting the writer’s conference from hell. There’s so much disgust and disdain and fear in that book, and it’s all written deliciously.
I hung out with so many characters who wondered if crime was the answer this year. In the short story collection Low Desert, Tod Goldberg’s gangsters case unfashionable sections of Southern California and Nevada, failing to solve a single one of their problems by committing crime in ways that are often hilarious. More former goons should fail to set themselves along the straight and narrow by going to part time DJ school. If you had a conversation with me that lasted more than fifteen minutes this year, I recommended S.A. Cosby’s novels Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland to you. Razorblade Tears is about a black dad and a white dad looking for revenge for their married sons’ murders, and Blacktop Wasteland is about a guy whose money issues reluctantly lead him to take on a bad idea jewelry store robbery. They both feature rural Virginia ex-cons facing big systemic problems that they think will be solved by doing one last job until they realize that isn’t quite true, and end up being about what happens to people when there are no rules and not enough social support in your community. When something terrible happens to you and nobody’s gonna help you but you. His pacing does a pretty good job of capturing the feeling of leaning out a car window at eighty miles an hour and feeling the wind hit your hair.
I felt like I was running around Belfast with the members of the IRA’s D Company in the seventies in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing because he describes the Troubles so vividly, and it’s just as intense to watch former IRA members move towards peace under the Good Friday Agreement and try to figure out how to reckon with what they did in the past. Two months of me torturing my family with trap songs I loved eight hundred times more than they did turned into me digging into The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, which might have the most sheer volume of story of any book I read this year. He flips between trapping for money and rapping with skill with great style and humor. Even if you don’t listen to trap, the man can plot a memoir like nobody’s business. Every time it feels like he’s finally able to kick his trapping past and devote himself fully to the music, something pops up that leads him off the path. And the cover is really badass too. One of his hands with a ring that implies he’s seen the mountaintop and some weathering that hints at the down times.
The novel Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian is a book that doesn’t seem possible: a surprisingly empathetic book about a pack of psychopaths that have agreed to be studied in exchange for free tuition at a D.C. university. When someone starts murdering them one by one, they get drawn into trying to figure out who the killer is, but because they’re psychopaths, they have even less reason to trust each other than people usually do. In the middle of an irresistible plot, Kurian lays in some really moving writing about rape and love.
The last category of books I read this year emotionally pulled me in with truths about the Black experience. As a kid who used to escape my house to sneak off to the library and read fashion magazines, I always fixed on the Black models and Andre Leon Talley, who always seemed to be the only black guy in the frame. His memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, lovingly immersed me in 50-plus years of fashion, but the parts that really hit had to do with what it was like for him to be a kid of the Jim Crow South confronting the limitations of what the white fashion world expected of him and allowed him to do. There’s a particularly poignant section near the end of the book: “I occupy white spaces, but I am a proud black man, who is proud of his ancestral past. My ancestral recall is my spiritual storehouse and my foundation. My grandmother, who is paramount in my life, was the role model that gave me structure, faith and values that I still live by.” As a black person who has mostly been employed in predominantly white spaces, this passage hit me so hard that I try to take it with me as much as I can. Talley understood that drawing upon Blackness can be a source of strength when we are alone, maybe even a type of body armor that carries us through our day. And Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, by telling stories of hundreds of years of the Ghanian and African American experiences, simply and poignantly reminded me, as a descendant of slaves, of everything historically that we have lost since our ancestors got dragged onto ships.
As you can see, I’m a lighthearted person prone to reading relaxing works about pain and crime. But there’s something in these darker narratives I always find refreshing and true in this era of rising rents, increased homeless, and plowing through a pandemic in a country that likes to cosplay as someplace with healthcare. I’m one of those people who likes to know the depth and width of the pit before I try to figure out to leave it. But I also like darkness in books for darkness’ sake, for its willingness to allow people to contain as many multitudes as they actually do.
More from A Year in Reading 2022
A Year in Reading Archives: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
