My Year in Reading 2021

In January I was reading Fanny Howe, and stopped midway through the third novel in Radical Love. I had been reading Fanny Howe for about a month straight and I decided I needed a break from this elliptical, rich, occasionally frustrating fictional world. I was in London at that time; I hadn’t gone home for the holidays; it was foggy and rainy and getting dark at 3 pm and I had a running injury that I was trying to remedy by doing yoga everyday instead. This didn’t last very long. I was, like a lot of people at that moment in time, bored and unhappy. I read Madeleine Watts’ beautiful novel Inland Sea, about a very different climate. Ben and I cooked elaborately. I read Glenn Adamson’s Craft: An American History for a review; I found it interesting—I learned things!—but also limited and limiting in its politics.

At the end of January I flew back to Boston. I left Radical Love behind because it was heavy and I thought I would be back soon. On the plane I read Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loebel—I remember almost nothing about it now. In Boston, it was cold and bleak but at least it snowed a lot. I sat in the kitchen with my mom and went over to Alex and Cole’s house on Fridays and Saturdays with Charlotte. Cole cooked us wonderful meals and we drank dark beers and considered the state of things. I tried to read Shuggie Bain, but something about it felt too close to home, even though it’s objectively not at all close to home; I had a rare experience of finding a good book unbearable to read. On drives and runs, I listened to Down City by Leah Carroll, much closer to home literally, but easier to swallow. I read Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories, very slowly—perfect. Sometimes I met friends outdoors at bars and restaurants in subfreezing weather. Charlotte and I went to New Haven, and we ate outside at Geronimo’s after a snowstorm.

 In March, I read Marco D’Eramo’s The World in a Selfie, whose name disguises a very serious and theoretical and interesting book about travel. It was appropriate because thus began my period of semi-itinerance; I went to Maine for a few weeks. I read a draft of my friend Devon’s brilliant novel—part of it was set in New Mexico, where she was, and where I would go a few weeks later and marvel at the same desert/mountain landscape. I read and enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. I read Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley for a review and Bolt from the Blue by Jeremy Cooper for another; I liked the Cooper a lot for its portrait of family estrangement and proximity over time.

In April, back in Boston, I read Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett and fell in love with it. Her sentences! Funny and strange and sad and somehow perfect? I got a vaccine and the world began to feel open and hopeful. I went to Rhode Island with Charlotte and Mack, and then to New Haven to see Claire and then drove on to New York, where I had some work-related things to do, but where I was also beginning to test the waters of living after a few years of resisting the pull. I read The Hard Crowd, essays by Rachel Kushner and The Sarah Book by Scott McLanahan. Then Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg, which I liked a lot less than her other novels—something too spare about it.

 April and May and even June blend together, back and forth between Boston and New York, sleeping in people’s empty apartments and driving that wretched but familiar drive, always stopping in New Haven. I listened to, but didn’t finish, Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment and the first six months of Caveh Zahedi’s podcast, which I was writing about. I read a fascinating book on the history of the filing cabinet by Craig Robertson for a review, highlighting a printed-out galley in Prospect Park in chilly sun while waiting for Graham to come meet me. In June, I started Drifts by Kate Zambreno while staying with my best friend in Greenpoint, which I liked at first but came to feel like a chore. I’m tired of writers writing about not writing! Tired of people pretending distraction is a wholly contemporary phenomenon! My childhood dog died very suddenly, a heartbreak. 

 At long last, I went back to London. There was still a 10-day quarantine for American travelers. Isolation reading: slogging through Drifts and Prepare Her by Genevieve Plunkett by a review. Mostly I was watching international soccer, suddenly obsessed with the sport for some obscure reason. I listened also to a lot of live Grateful Dead shows. Upon my release in London: meeting Rachel at The Shakespeare, walks with Ben around Islington, taking the overground to Jago’s beautiful house and then the fast train to Cambridge to watch England-Denmark with Cassie in the garden of a pub and the 19 bus to the London Review Bookshop where I used up the remainder of a birthday gift card on a big stack of books. Among them was Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property, at Claire’s prompting—the most up-my-alley book of all time. The light was very long and everything was inflected with the in-advance-nostalgia of moving soon. We packed up the house, all the books and pots and pans. 

It was July. I wasn’t working very much. I loved The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald—a book I’ll force on anyone now—how does she do it? On the porch with coffee one morning I read Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, which I liked fine, but not as much as everyone who recommended it seemed to think I would. It was very sharp. On Longing by Susan Stewart, for a project about collecting; a really mind-expanding, difficult, lovely book, one of the best pieces of academic writing I can remember. Also The Collection by Nina Leger, at Caroline’s recommendation. It’s not published in the U.S. probably because it is too perverted and bizarre but I loved it. In the same vein, very French and surreal and sexually charged, Anne Serre’s The Governesses.

I flew to Spain to meet Alex and Lia—the first time we’d all been together since the start of the pandemic, which at this point seemed to be coming to some kind of end. On the plane, I read Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion in one sitting, totally rapt. (It occurs to me now that for no reason I can discern, I was reading a lot of French women this year.) Then Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Then lying on the beach talking for a week straight. From there, to New York, for good. I stayed in Graham’s empty apartment that first week and felt suspended above the city. It was a pleasantly lonely week, kind of, and I read The Years by Annie Ernaux, completely awed. And then The Beginners by Anne Serre, a novel about yearning so perfect that it was almost too painful for me to finish-—too close, once again, to home. But I did finish it, outside at a wine bar in Fort Greene waiting to meet someone, a little breathless.

Then it was August and I lived in New York. How do people have time to read in New York?? There is too much happening all the time! I was working, and I was making new friends, and I was watching soccer on Sunday mornings, and I was staying up very late on Fridays and Saturdays, and the month slipped by in a total haze. I read Heartburn by Nora Ephron and made the pasta she makes, then lent it to Sara. I also read Gate of Angels, Fitzgerald’s Cambridge novel. I printed out and read another draft of Devon’s novel, totally changed, more textured, coming into a new focus.                                                                                                                 

September was Percival Everett season, at least for me, and everyone who was reading his new book, Trees. I read, for good measure, So Much Blue, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Telephone. There is no one like him! A genius! I also pushed his novels into other people’s hands—Sara and I compared endings for Telephone and considered all the possible outcomes. I talked about his particular genius on the phone with some writers for a piece that may or may not ever appear, but felt worthwhile all the same. I went to the public library and read most of a book about Beanie Babies, for research. Also for research, I read a lot of terrible children’s books by politicians, and wrote about them.

 In October, everything seemed to shift. I read Sally Rooney’s new book—I liked the first two—and this one was basically fine, except the ending, which I hated. I wasn’t sleeping or eating much. I read The End of the Affair and then Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley, which was totally engrossing, maybe my favorite of hers. I spent Halloween in a big beach house drinking beer with friends and occasionally trying to dip into Wings of the Dove but I gave up; my head was elsewhere. I went to a bar with friends and read an Edith Wharton ghost story out loud. In November, I spent whole days forgoing work and reading novels in bed—Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints, one of my all-time favorites. And then, after years of hearing people recommend it, Norman Rush’s Mating. It felt like I gave over a week of my life to that book, which was sublime. I kept texting friends “!!!” alongside fragments from it. Rebecca and I went on a walk in the park and talked about it; Krithika sent me her notes, which included words and fragments that I’d glossed over. How could this be so good? It felt like it clarified something for me, something about love/life, though I couldn’t say at all what that was.

I ordered a lot of Nancy Lemann’s out-of-print novels online, and read The Fiery Pantheon, which is even less like a novel than Lives of the Saints, and more like a long digressive, hilarious, bizarre essay on the experience of place. I liked it but kept putting it down. December snuck up on me, things got busy again, I started running around and seeing people, until it seemed like everyone I knew got sick. For a piece, I started reading a book called Extinct on obsolete objects, and Judith Schalansky’s Inventory of Losses, both not finished yet, both different ways of thinking through deaths of things. I started What Maisie Knew. On trains around New England for Christmas, I read Danzy Senna’s wonderful Boston novel, Caucasia, which is dedicated to her mom, Fanny Howe, which reminded me to go back to Howe’s big book of novels, which I’d eventually hauled across the Atlantic. Now it’s the last two days of December, and it turns out that, at long last, I’m sick and shut inside, about to open Radical Love again.

My Year in Reading 2020

My reading this year was deranged and flickering but in the beginning I was reading dutifully. After New Year’s at Mack’s house in New Hampshire I took a long, long train from White River Junction to New York City in the snow and looked out the window and felt cozy and bleak while I finished Hermione Lee’s massive tome of a biography on Edith Wharton and occasionally slept off a hangover on the seats. I had been dragging that book all over with me, and now I was finished and rather in awe of Lee and especially the scene at the end with her tidying Edith’s grave. 

I continued my dutiful reading along two syllabi, for seminars in “Assemblage Theory” and “Contemporary American Fiction” and my long paper about the fictional houses in Wharton’s novels. January started with The Corrections, which I read on planes between San Francisco and Boston, and also trains here and there, and which I loved, unequivocally. The best novel I’d read in ages! Franzen is a genius, whatever! For the fiction class, I reread Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth—what I hadn’t remembered was the liveliness of the descriptions of New England. Back in England, I read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I liked quite a lot, except the ending. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a slow and pleasurable reread, though I found the Reverend Ames more didactic the second time around. I read an old exhibition catalog called the Art of Assemblage by William Seitz, alongside John Ashbery’s Vermont Notebook, which I had to go handle with care in a rare books library else I would have liked to spend more time with all the drawings.

 For fun, I read Claire’s copy of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and The Topeka School by Ben Lerner, which was my least favorite of his novels but since he is one of my favorite writers, immensely pleasurable just the same. And a book by my former teacher and current friend Cynthia Zarin, Two Cities, two long essays about Rome and Venice that moved me. I finished Aftermath by Rachel Cusk, a slim and cutting divorce memoir with a twisty ending, and then Summer, a short novel by Edith Wharton, and one of her weirdest.

I guess it was February now? I was pretty miserable at the end of January, succumbing to anxiety about the future, and I wasn’t sleeping well but I did read a lot. We had a week on “autofiction” so I read Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? and reread 10:04, which everyone in my seminar hated but I love. I spent a lot of time with 10:04 in March, writing a long paper about collectivity and the circulation of objects in Lerner’s work. Then House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. Maybe something is wrong with me, because everyone else in seminar hated it again, but I was bowled over by its sheer ambition and inventiveness. Erasure by Percival Everett: amazing, so funny, so cutting. I’m full of superlatives, probably because I pretty much stopped reading all the books that didn’t interest me after a few pages and I mostly forget what they were. Also I was supposed to read Moby-Dick in February but I simply did not. Sorry!

March came, and the world stopped, or seemed to stop. I moved fully into Ben’s house in London. My reading became sporadic, as did my sleeping again. I reread Leaving the Atocha Station, and lots of criticism and theory and poetry, for my paper on Lerner, which I worked on in between my daily walks. I read some apocalypse literature: Jenny Offill’s weather; extremely blah, kind of like reading Twitter. For a review, Mark O’Connell’s Notes from the Apocalypse (good narrative nonfiction!). A novel called Black Wave by Michelle Tea that I checked out of the library. I loved the half about San Francisco, a place I was missing, even though it was about a San Francisco that mostly existed before I did. 

There was a weird streak of perfect London weather. There were often sirens and I had a drought of reading. In late April I emerged from the drought by reading Tana French’s Wych Elm. Then The Age of Innocence and three novels on visual art for a review: The Gift by Barbara Browning (incredible!), How to Be Both, Ali Smith, The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst. Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner—the San Francisco of my lifetime captured luminously. A close friend’s novel in progress, which I loved.

May was a weird in-between time when things were still bad but seemed to be getting better in London and worse elsewhere. I did not yet know this would be the perpetual oscillating state of things. I read Stephanie Danler’s Stray, not a good book, but a way to think through families and addictions. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen—hard to chew on at first, but the ending gave me chills. Back-to-back, Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore and Innocence. I loved Offshore especially, and her writing of these couples who hate loving each other and make their lives miserable but still somehow streaked with joy. For my birthday, Holly sent me a copy of Parallel Lives, an astonishing book about five marriages that I read very slowly and enjoyed immensely.  

In June I was reading the news of police murders in American cities and also watching the protests and feeling angry and, simultaneously, very physically far away. I was thinking about crime and the way we write about it, and I read The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson; it had an interesting urgency that seemed missing from some of her later work—maybe to do with youth? The days in London were long and full of light but we were still hemmed in our bubble. I biked to Rachel’s and she lent me Lanny in exchange for Uncanny Valley—a good trade. I was finishing my long paper about Edith Wharton and reading a lot of criticism and spatial theory, I guess, though strangely I don’t really remember much about this time. 

 In July, I flew back to Boston. On the way I read The Superrationals by Stephanie LaCava, and The Golden Bowl by Henry James. At home while I quarantined, I sat on my roof and read James and got a sunburn. I got drunk with my friends in parks and on balconies. I read Early Work by Andrew Martin, which I liked a lot. I bought his book of stories, Cool for America, and I liked them even more, but felt like they flew by. That was more or less all I could handle reading for July and August because I was having so much fun seeing friends in parks and hanging out with my brothers and lying at the beach and drinking beer and making calls for Ed Markey and occasionally trying to do as much work as I could squeeze into the fewest possible hours of a given day. I did read Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait for a review, mostly in the sunlight.

 In September, a sense of things turning again—a return on the horizon to a pandemic that had never really stopped, and also my return to England. I was reading Marilynne Robinson’s Jack for a review; I decided to dip back into all of her works, so I reread Home and Lila. Home, especially, I love. There is one passage I am always going to think about, which I’m posting here. Mid-September, another flight, back to London and Ben.

 My reading this fall has been bad, mainly in the sense that it has been occasionally forced, like I have to scold myself to get off the computer and open a book. This almost always helps my mood but I am doing it less frequently without self-scolding. Some bright spots: Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding and Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation. Vox by Nicholson Baker, which I got on sale; really wonderful erotic experiment. Claire and I started doing what we called “book club” on Zoom where we talked about all the books we read, which were usually but not always different books.

 In October, I read Shirley Hazzard. I picked up a copy of The Bay of Noon that was lying around, and just fell into her sentences again. There is nobody like her! So I also read The Great Fire and The Evening of the Holiday, but The Bay of Noon was the best, besides The Transit of Venus, which I read last year but is also the best. I bought her collected short stories but haven’t read them yet. I also read The Bookshopby Penelope Fitzgerald. Maybe all novels should be 150-200 pages, though that cuts against my feelings about The Corrections, but by the end of the year I was only reading short books. Also I read a lot of recipes, many of them by Yotam Ottolenghi.

 In November, I read constantly about the election, against my better judgment. I listened to Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method, about the program of mass murder of leftists in Indonesia and Brazil and elsewhere during the Cold War. Upsetting, obviously, but extremely worthwhile and I learned a lot. I read Gary Indiana’s memoir I Can’t Give You Anything But Love; wonderfully unsentimental personal writing, especially the part about childhood. Started and didn’t finish Sarah Thornton’s sociological book about the art world, and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, another impulse sale purchase, which I thought was almost comically terrible. Another book trade with Rachel: Shirley Hazzard and Anna Burns for Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg, and Memorial by Bryan Washington. On Thanksgiving Friday I read Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, As Such, the first fiction I’d read by her—extremely apt recommendation from the n+1 Bookmatch quiz.

Finally, in December, idk, I read the internet. I worked my way through Sarah Wasserman’s The Death of Things, for a piece on objects in literature and dying things; I found it extremely profound and compelling. A Lover’s Discourse by Xialolu Guo. And, now, Radical Love by Fanny Howe—another recommendation from Holly—which is five of Howe’s novels collected, and which is glowing, strange, weird excellent prose, and which I intend to read into the twilight of this year.

My Year in Reading, 2019:

Because reading doesn’t align so well with annual calendars, I started this year by finishing two books I began last year. Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin, rough and uneven and sometimes sharply beautiful, with so many good sentences, and An Enlarged Heart by Cynthia Zarin, essays by a teacher and mentor who is now also a friend, which revealed themselves to me like nesting dolls. Then All The Lives We Ever Lived by Katherine Smyth, for a review, which mainly made me want to read more Virginia Woolf, which I didn’t, at least this year.

I spent February in London and read Lonely City by Olivia Laing—looking back at New York across the ocean and also through the lenses of artists I’ve loved. The section on Edward Hopper moved me. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis—crushing, spare, more confirmation that she writes about the ends of relationships better than anyone. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi; disappointing, to me, a bit perplexing, with bright spots. I read Adéle by Leïla Slimani in the garden of a pub near Ben’s house in Islington during freak winter weather that veered in into the high 60s. I was floored by its cruelty and power, but strangely I remember very little of it now. Party Going by Henry Green—an absolute masterpiece of a novel in which nothing and everything happens as people move between rooms, marooned in a railway hotel by London fog.

 March: Tessa Hadley’s Accidents in the Home, which inspired me to write an elegy for the landline in fiction. On the plane home to Boston, in one sitting, Nancy Lehmann’s Lives of the Saints—a weird, marvelous, underappreciated book that I can’t stop recommending to everyone who will listen. In the Berkshires with my mom, before she had an operation, I read Milkman by Anna Burns. My favorite book this year? It’s the one that always comes to mind: there aren’t enough adjectives for it, just read it. (I will say I think it’s much funnier than most critics have noticed!) Another plane, this time West to ski with my dad, I forced my way through Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute, which I hated—something about its syntax. Everyone else loves it, and I loved the cover (Hopper) but I couldn’t swallow it.  

In April, finally back in New York—it was a peripatetic year, among other things, crisscrossing the country and the Atlantic—I was mostly alone, reading at a pizza place in the East Village where I got the lunch deal or in my bed in the lengthening evening light. Spring was a rush, though it’s usually my least favorite season. I read Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock—a spooky mirage, slow-going, satisfying—and Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz, absolutely delicious. The New Me by Halle Butler went down quickly but disappointingly, helped me think about what a workplace novel could be and what this one wasn’t. I turned 24.

May: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, the first ever audiobook I loved. A nearly perfect piece of nonfiction in my mind, and a perfect book to listen to on many planes. In Mexico City with Becca, I couldn’t stop talking about The Troubles, the wrong history for the place, but she humored me. I started Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and I wasn’t gripped. In San Francisco, I halfheartedly read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I didn’t like it, though I wasn’t focusing well in May, or I was focusing on other things. On the way to a wedding in Wisconsin, I began reading Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve—a book a bit like Lonely City, but more interesting. Even though I was distracted, its images keep coming back.

In June, back in London with Ben, my focus returned and I bought books compulsively. I picked up Shirley Hazzard again and got my heart absolutely broken by the novel. Someone tweeted about it, how we’re missing novels where sex means something, and I think that’s true, and this is one of them. It belongs in the same category as Lives of The Saints and Sex and Rage—I don’t know why, it does. I read No Bones by Anna Burns, weirder and darker than Milkman, also wonderful. I read Possession by A.S. Byatt, an old-fashioned masterpiece. For a review, Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites, nonfiction and criticism that made me think differently about crime writing.

July, I flew home—Boston and New York, back and forth. I started eating a lot of dollar oysters and for the first time in my life I liked drinking white wine. I read outside at bars: Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill—sensitive and sharp and full of the world—and Severance by Ling Ma. I started running again, in earnest. I read Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and cried. I listened, on runs and walks around New York, to Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard is True, a devastating memoir and history of El Salvador in the 1970s and what she saw when she was there. Another example of what perfect nonfiction can be, very different from Keefe’s. I listened also to Salvador by Joan Didion, a short account of the same time, startling maybe because it overturned more of my constantly-shifting convictions about What Joan Didion Stands For.

I think it was August now? I listened to Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, totally absorbing and appalling. I read a novella, The Couples, by Nicole Callihan—in Rhode Island, a good setting to imagine a quadrangle of couples at a country house, their quiet dark dramas. In the park with Ben and at my pizza place, I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—remarkable, changed the way I see. Like the rest of the world, I read Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which I enjoyed, especially her more personal essays. I started Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz, interested in its project and bored by its content. I let it fall away and it became the first of many books I wouldn’t finish this year. 

In September, I read What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt—an exquisite novel of ideas. Maybe that’s a trite description, but it made me think about “big questions” about art and life, all while being a totally absorbing novel. Super Pumped, by Mike Isaac—excellent and alarming reporting on Uber.  For a reporting project, at the suggestion of an editor, I read a big chunk of The Ivory Trade by Joseph Horowitz about the Van Cliburn piano competition, a lively and fascinating portrait of a specific subset of American culture at a specific time. In Spain with Alex and Lia, I read half of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk but I disliked the sentences and couldn’t get close to it. Mostly in Spain we talked, anyway. On return to England—this time a permanent, or at least, semi-permanent one—I read The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, for a review. I thought it was challenging and rewarding: what a workplace novel uninterested in the self can be.

In October I started graduate school, where I went in part because I wanted my reading to be more ordered. I’m not sure it’s been more ordered, but it has been more directed, hewing to syllabi and periods and themes. I’ve learned a lot of new words and have also read many pieces of what we call “secondary criticism” which have opened something of a new world for me that begins with JSTOR. In October, in libraries and coffee shops around Cambridge and Ben’s new house and trains back and forth from London and my fluorescent dorm-y room, I read Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom (difficult and powerful) and The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault and An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (the second brilliantly subverting the first). I read and loved Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—no one told me Twain wrote one of the best send-ups of technological progress? I struggled through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, which had moments of beauty and big ideas but felt, I’ll admit, like a chore. I read Nina Siren’s Wake, Siren for a review and it was a wonderful experiment, one that made me want to return to Ovid. (I didn’t really do that either, yet). I started Hermione Lee’s enormous, excellent biography of Edith Wharton, the main subject of my work in grad school.

November got chilly and dark in England. I read Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. It was deft and brilliant, especially the ending—Edith twists the knife so many times. How does she do it? I reread My Ántonia by Willa Cather (quiet, stunning) and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which I hadn’t touched since high school and which felt like a revelation. I reread Housekeeping again in December, too, for a long paper I’m writing and perhaps no book has touched me more in a soul-feeling way than this one. Other books for school: The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (why did I wait so long?), Native Son by Richard Wright (I didn’t finish—life got in the way). I read A Sense of Things by Bill Brown, very slowly, a book of theory about object matter in American literature. I’m not really exaggerating when I say it changed my life.

 December, a month in which I wrote very little and read quite a lot. It was very dark in England and grim, but sort of in a good way. Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick—a wonderful, sharp blur. I want to read it again. I reread Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Some poetry, an oversight in general this year: This Connection of Everything with Lungs by Juliana Spahr. Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers—not good. Then The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson, for my paper, which made me think quite a lot and somewhat surprisingly about God. Sublime and difficult essays. Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch for a review—strange resonances with Robinson, a feat of reporting and difficult writing.

Then, home in Boston, awaiting Christmas, I read three novels by Wharton—a perfect way to pass the end of the year, in the bath and by a lighted tree. First The Reef, a vexing but interesting book that is all about sex and surfaces. Then The Mother’s Recompense, which is really a remarkable novel, underappreciated, and very weird. Now, still, The House of Mirth, which I’m rereading and savoring as the year comes to quiet close.