Whenever I write, I ask myself: what sort of things do I want to make my reader feel? Writers do not have full sway, but like hosts at a dinner party, we can set the mood. We light the candles, we decide whether we want to offer comfort or—I think of the friend who served Jello made “the old-fashioned way,” with a boiled cow hoof—to provoke. The reader, like the house guest, can know only so much about what awaits her. She appears at the door; she leaves whenever she wants.
As a reader, I have made the mistake of picking a book because I think I can predict how it will make me feel. While it is true one might anticipate their spectrum of feelings—I read The Last Supper, Rachel Cusk’s Italian travelogue, when I wanted to reroute my envy of spritz-drinkers on my Instagram feed last June—we should not mistake anticipatory vibes for emotional roadmap. You cannot predict the alchemical reaction that your life, at a particular moment of reading, will have with a book. Because I scan reviews of restaurants before I eat at them, and listen to algorithm-curated playlists, most of my consumption is steered by a glut of “knowledge.” Though I read book criticism and talk frequently about books with other people, I will also read a book purely because a friend’s crush wrote it, or an aunt told me a scene reminded them of me. To consider the 50-some books I read in 2023 is to confront that reading is one of the last places where I let myself wade into the pleasure and discomfort of the unknown.
Writing about love and environmental disaster, I plucked two novels off bookstore shelves because their titles seemed to gesture at this theme: Land of Love and Ruins, by Icelandic writer and activist Oddny Oir (translated by Philip Roughton), and Love at Six Thousand Degrees, by Maki Kashimada (translated by Haydn Trowell). This same project led me to Sulaimon Addaimon’s Silence is My Mother Tongue, Jens Liljestrand’s Even if Everything Ends, Madeline Watts’s The Inland Sea, and Farah Ali’s The River, The Town. I did not have to wait long for these books—each of which took place in a different country, none of which were my own—to begin to talk to one another. Nonfiction books I’d imagined might be relevant—like Eva Illouz’ The End of Love, and On Love by Jose Ortega y Gasset—began to chatter too.
I read books with “noun & noun” titles where I knew nothing about the plots, but felt a kinship with every noun: Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage, and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss.
I read books by people I’m lucky to be in conversation with: Linda Kinstler’s Come To This Court and Cry, Sierra Crane-Murdoch’s Yellow Bird, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night, Casey Park’s Diary of a Misfit, Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land, Talia Kolluri’s What We Fed to the Manticore, Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, and the forthcoming Namesake, a thrilling weave of essays about family, identity, and history, from Palestinian-British writer Nuzha Nuseibeh.
I read books that a younger version of myself would have pretended, in certain company, to have already absorbed: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
I read poetry collections—like Natalie Eilbert’s Overland, Gabrielle Bates’s Judas Goat, and Megan Fernandes’s I Do Everything I’m Told—and scavenged titles and line fragments for writing prompts.
Do you see that these paragraphs cannot encompass all the books I read, but rather suggest a certain logic of selection?
Imagine us, two guests, bumping into one another on the porch outside the dinner party. We’ll hug, we’ll go inside. The evening will be beautiful. It will feel different to each of us.
More from A Year in Reading 2023
A Year in Reading Archives: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
