Clawing my way out of a listless reading slump with this refreshing and beautifully strange collection of stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine

As good as they say: In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado

Australian writer Helen Garner has been on my to-read list for years, and I finally got around to her most recent novel: The Spare Room. Pretty slim in length and tonally breezy, but dense with Big Life Stuff: aging and illness, family and friendship, how to build a life and how to reach the end of life. It was an intense read, but refreshing to have someone writing openly about about this hard experiences.

Here are my favorite non-fiction/poetry titles from 2020: Minor Feelings. Cathy Park Hong [US] When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back. Naja Marie Aidt [Danish, Denmark] I Will Never See the World Again. Ahmet Altan [Turkish, Turkey] Fireflies. Luis Sagasti [Spanish, Argentina] Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. Olivia Laing [England] The Cost of Living. Deborah Levy [South Africa/England] How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Daniel Immerwahr [US] The Tribe of the Esraris. Ahmet Güntan [Turkish, Turkey] The Deaf Republic. Ilya Kaminsky [Ukraine/USA] Syncope. Asiya Wadud [US]

I've been hemming and hawing about narrowing down my favorite reads of 2020 list to a top 10ish. In 2020, the year of years, I read 160 books. 80% fiction, 20% non-fiction; 73% by women, 27% by men. 83% in English, 17% translated from other languages, representing 8 languages and 26 countries of author origin. This was the year I got into audiobooks, mostly mysteries and thrillers, consumed mostly while walking. There are 25 titles on my fiction longlist, and you know what, fuck it, I'm not the Man Booker Committee, so here they all are: Tears of the Trufflepig. Fernando A. Flores [US/Mexico] A Luminous Republic. Andrés Barba [Spanish, Spain] Strange Weather in Tokyo. Hiromi Kawakami [Japanese, Japan] Scorpionfish. Natalie Bakopoulos [US] The Milkman. Anna Burns [No. Ireland] The Wind That Lays Waste. Selva Almada [Spanish, Argentina] Priestdaddy. Patricia Lockwood [US] Labyrinth. Burhan Sönmez [Turkish, Turkey] Die, My Love. Ariana Harwicz [Spanish, Argentina] Himself. Jess Kidd [England] Sweet Days of Discipline. Fleur Jaeggy [Italian, Switzerland] Pizza Girl. Jean Kyoung Frazier [US] Include Me Out. María Sonia Cristoff [Spanish, Argentina] Lanny. Max Porter [England] Hex. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight [US] Little Eyes. Samanta Schweblin [Spanish, Argentina] So Many Olympic Exertions. Anelise Chen [US/Taiwan] Hurricane Season. Fernanda Melchor [Spanish, Mexico] On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Ocean Vuong [US/Vietnam] The Governesses. Anne Serre [French, France] Little Weirds. Jenny Slate [US] Crudo. Olivia Laing [England] Vertigo. Joanna Walsh [England] Foreign Affairs. Alison Lurie [US] Tokyo Ueno Station. Yu Miri [Japanese, Japan]

There's so much to say about this book, which will definitely be among my favorites from the year, but I'm in a pre-holiday mind mush and can't muster up the clarity/energy to go beyond noting that I finished this two days ago and have been at loose ends since then, as everything else I pick up and try to start reading feels dull and limp in comparison. Athletes, the body, swimming, academia, first-generation immigrant experience, quitting, suicide grief, adulthood, the classical Greeks. All of it. Exactly what I needed to read: So Many Olympic Exertions, by Anelise Chen

I don't really know what I think about this one: Silent House, by Orhan Pamuk, originally published in Turkish in 1983, translated to English for the first time in 2012 in the wake of the author's success with Snow. On one hand: no one does Istanbul nostalgia like Orhan bey (Silent House = summer in the city, pre-1980 coup). On the other hand: I guess if you don't want to read about whiny men creepily and invasively obsessed with women they don't know and inadvertently but predictably ruining those women's lives as a result of their toxic fixation...don't read Orhan Pamuk. Yeah, I guess I do know what I think about this one.

If translation describes how something is understood in a context that marks it as foreign, then translation happens whether or not we intend to perform it. But when I translate literature — carefully, deliberately — I try to interrupt these ad hoc translations based on xenophobic logics, passing fancies and lazy incuriosities. And when I’m reading translated literature — Tomas Transtromer, Marie NDiaye, Bei Dao, Elena Ferrante — I’m trying to listen for the ways my own patterns of thought are interrupted. Certain words stay stubborn on both sides of a border and don’t seem to want to disclose themselves. I take that as a reminder that getting to know someone, and getting to know myself, is always an unfinished business.

As has become my quarantine habit, I'm reading the hard-copy supplemented with the audiobook, gloriously read by English stage actor Eleanor Bron. This is actually a book that I think royals-obsessives could benefit from reading, as it paints its subjects in none-too-rosy or fawning a light, though it's not without empathy or even affection. Currently about 2/3 through, I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a page turner, but there's some narrative propulsion to it, and I'm enjoying seeing what deranged nonsense HRH will get up to next.

We very intentionally used as few italics as possible, precisely for the reasons you describe. Personally, I feel lots of italics start to “other,” making reading translated fiction a dangerously anthropological experience. But regarding Spanish becoming more familiar to Americans, some might argue I could have left more Spanish words in, and that North American readers would have understood it. But I find this also has the effect of “othering” or exoticizing. First and foremost, we’re telling a story; I didn’t want readers to think that these characters swear and love and feel like Mexicans, but rather that they swear and love and feel like me, you, anyone. After all, the characters don’t act on Mexican impulses, but human ones. Melchor’s language is very local in some ways, and this is a book reflecting on some aspects of living in Veracruz, but the stories it tells also transcend specific geographies and cultures.

I’m so glad you asked that. It’s my favorite question. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I wrote half of my book in the Nordstrom ladies room where there’s a couch and the other half with children sitting next to them watching TV so that they would have the illusion that I was spending time with them. Like, I never ask my sister, who’s a veterinarian, “Oh, you’re not blocked today, are you? Because you have that surgery to do.” This is a profession and you have to treat it professionally. At its heart, writer’s block is the act of thinking about writing instead of doing it. And if you just remember that, you can always know that you could just write the next sentence. It might not be very good, but the one after that probably will be.

“In the Back of Beyond,” for Taxis

But, for me, the point of leaving Ireland was exactly that. I was in hot pursuit of “the other” and was constantly, perhaps naively, surprised when confronted with the idea that “the other” was, in fact, me.