#endofyearlists

In this year of slowness, thank god for books to make the world a little larger again. I read several classics for the first time—Shelley’s Frankenstein and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day—all of which felt important to return to the source material, to see how these books shaped those that came after them. And I delved into new books from favorite authors whose words I will always seek out—like Kelly Schirmann’s The New World and Heather Christle’s The Crying Book—and I branched out into mystery and romance books because they kept pages turning and tidied everything up so neatly at the end, which if not my usual fare, was sorely needed in this strange year. But since I do love a list, here are the books that sung to me / inspired me / shaped me:

1. Exquisitely told and inventive in form, Women Talking by Miriam Toews centers on a group of Mennonite women in South America who discover they're being drugged and raped during the night by the men in their community. While the men are away, the women meet to decide whether they will stay and forgive their attackers, as their community’s religious leaders ask them to, or leave the colony and start anew. Their conversation over the course of two days questions the role of women, what freedom and forgiveness really mean, how to fulfill one’s calling as a woman, mother, and believer, whether one must choose one thing over another, and whether staying or leaving carries the greater risk. It’s a thoughtful and creative approach to hard questions and the complicated reasons why there’s never a right answer.

2. Ilya Kaminsky's collection, Dancing in Odessa, was one of the first books of contemporary poetry I ever read, lent to me by a friend in college, and I remember being stunned at what poetry could be and do. Deaf Republic stuns in the same way. The poems are incredibly cinematic, telling the story of an occupied town and its people and a couple who fall in love. When a young, deaf boy is shot by the soldiers, the entire town pretends deafness in rebellion, finding excuses to not understand the soldiers. They bear witness to the boy’s death and honor his life. Though a fictional town, the call to political action, to really see those who are being oppressed and stand for justice with them, is resonant for any time and place. Plus, Ilya writes the most beautiful love poems.

3. Another cinematically-inclined poetry book is GennaRose Nethercott’s The Lumberjack’s Dove. In this long poem/myth/fable, a lumberjack accidentally cuts off his hand, which turns into a dove, and then a story parts ways. The lumberjack is not just a lumberjack and the hand-turned-dove is not just a hand-turned-dove, and the story visits both an operating room and a witch, and the story, of course, is one you've heard before and one that brings surprise and wonder to the telling. I simply adored it.

"Living creatures believe they own something as soon as they love it. They refuse to believe otherwise, no matter how many times a beloved vanishes."

4. I fell in love—hard—with The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and her exquisite, queer love story between Achilles and Patroclus. Miller’s writing is wonderful and after reading her novel Circe as well—another fantastic retelling of Greek myths—I spent the remainder of the year searching for a novel that compared.

5. Some books meet you in the right moment. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is a slow and attentive book on small things, which in 2020’s period of waiting and uprootedness was a gift. Due to chronic illness, Bailey finds herself confined to a bed with little to do. Her friend brings her a potted plant and a snail whose pace of life, matching her own, becomes a comfort and lessons her loneliness. As she watches, she learns intimately the snail's eating and sleeping habits, its daily adventures, and the conditions it best thrives in. Later she delves into the literature and science of gastropods and weaves her notes in with her own observations and stories of the snail. Her writing is light and funny and holds such tenderness for this very small creature.

"In the History of Animals, Aristotle noted that snail teeth are 'sharp, and small, and delicate.' My snail possessed around 2,640 teeth, so I'd add the word plentiful to Aristotle's description....With only thirty-two adult teeth, which had to last the rest of my life, I found myself experiencing tooth envy toward my gastropod companion. It seemed far more sensible to belong to a species that had evolved natural tooth replacement than to belong to one that had developed the dental profession. Nonetheless, dental appointments were one of my favorite adventures, as I could count on being recumbent. I could see myself settling into the dental chair, opening my mouth for my dentist, and surprising him with a human-sized radula."

6. Insecurity System by Sara Wainscott was one of my favorite books published in 2020. The poems in it make up four crowns—a series of sonnets in which the last line of each poem becomes the first line (or an echo of it) of the next. The playfulness of the form as well as the topics give the book an energy: Sara muses on time travel, levitation, memory, flowers ("people who read poems know a rose / is how the poet drags in genitalia"), motherhood, Mars, and mythical transformations (children tell their mothers they have turned to seals “and it is true”). Sara is funny and wry, and yet she also captures some difficult emotions of grief and depression, a struggle with complacency amid daily obligations “Sentences become drawn out affairs / but I am doing what I can / to answer one word each day.” The poems move from the mundane to a hard feeling and then onward to wonder and a bit of the fantastical, which I guess is just how life goes—I love how these emotions are all rolled together and always shifting.

7. Asiya Wadud’s powerful long poem Syncope is one I’ve returned to often throughout the year. She tells the story of 72 refugees who fled Tripoli in an inflatable boat in 2011 and were stranded for 14 days, despite the presence of 38 maritime vessels who could have rescued them, but didn’t. Instead, only 11 passengers survived. Syncope is both an indictment against those who did not act and a eulogy for the dead, returning humanity to people who were deemed not worth saving but who were “luminous in that / we were each born under the / fabled light of some star.”

“We began as 72 ascendants by that I mean we were a collective many each bound for greatness merely in the fact that we were each still living”

8. Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had is a thoughtful and exploratory conversation about capitalism and its effects on what we do and how we think. In a series of short vignettes, Eula picks apart what consumption, work, accounting, and investment mean on a personal and everyday level (albeit a white, middle class level). Who defines value among boys trading Pokemon cards and how did Monopoly's origins in economic injustice shift to pride in bankrupting players and if one of Eula's favorite things about being a new house owner is easy access to a laundry machine, is her house merely a $400,000 container for one washer and dryer? Her essays bounce from work that is valued, unseen or shamed; the perceptions and realities of being poor or rich; our approach to gift-giving and art-making and pleasure—weaving together research, observations, and conversations with friends.

9. In Grief Sequence, poet Prageeta Sharma’s grieves the loss of her husband in a kind of journal, tracing the memories of his diagnosis, the hard and normal days, the days before diagnosis, and the days after he is gone during which she tries to make sense of her new reality: “How gauche it is to be in this body being unseen by you now,” she writes. “You are not you anymore and I am trying to understand how a human with feelings has disappeared.” Her writing is excellent but it is hard to sit with and next to her pain, and it makes me wonder: when does one read such a book? When you’ve also lost a beloved to cancer? To be in conversation with someone who has, with Prageeta? Do you read for the sake of the living or to honor a body who was once here? Prageeta writes, “Poetry and grief are the same: you are taught to care about it when it happens to you.” I don’t know who to recommend this book to, but it spoke to me, and I’m glad she wrote it, as a monument, of sorts, to a specific togetherness and to a person.

10. The Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis is a strange and sweet book about a race of genetically-engineered dogs, created initially to be soldiers, who move to New York in the ‘90s while still holding onto the customs and dress of nineteenth-century Prussia, which is to say: I don't know if I ever would have picked this book up had a friend not recommended it. Told through news clippings, letters, journal entries, an opera(!), and the first-person account of a human who befriends them, their story has echoes of Frankenstein as the monster dogs reflect on their creator and what it is to be human, to have purpose and hope, to wrestle with a clouded past and an uncertain future. "It's a terrible thing to be a dog and know it," writes one monster dog scholar after some of the dogs begin to revert back to their primal state. I loved the varied forms, the piecing together of the dog’s history, and the surreal mark they left in the book’s world and my world.

This year has included a lot of scholarly reading for work, and so it's been harder to turn to reading for pleasure. When I did, it was easiest to escape into fiction, letting the story do the work of hooking me, rather than quieting my mind enough to engage with poetry or being able to take in more information through nonfiction. I've missed them both, though, especially as reading more fiction led to more encounters with books I didn't care as much about. Whatever I read, though, most often was read on my porch—the first one I've had in a long time, and I can't enthuse enough over a porch space, a book (and a blanket in spring/fall), my pup Olive and a glass of tea/coffee/wine/dark beer, and dreamy gazing at the birds and blossoms nearby...

1. Perhaps my favorite fiction read was Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, who writes about the power of stories in our individual lives and the way one story can connect us across time, place, and circumstance. In the book, a story is just barely rescued from obscurity, existing only in fragments. Centuries later, it is translated from Greek by a Vietnam War veteran and performed as a play in the middle of winter by elementary school kids. Centuries after that, a young girl on a spaceship whose destination won't arrive in her lifetime finds this particular story and its history at a time when she needs it most. Because of illiteracy, a minority status, or circumstance, each character exists in a small or somewhat isolated world, which the fragmented story helps expand, both figuratively and then literally by being a catalyst that throws them alongside others. It's a beautiful novel about why we read, and Doerr's steady weaving together of the timelines has a very satisfying ending.

A lot of the book focuses on the act of translation and Doerr draws a line from being a good writer or creator to also being a good reader. One reads and is transformed by it, and then further transforms by embedding the insight into new fiction or another creative work, so that we are always building upon what's come before us, and in this way continue our connection.

2. Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is, on the surface, about video games, which doesn't actually appeal to me, but on a deeper level, about the unique space friendship holds in our lives and in the creative life and about the energy of collaboration and telling a good story. Sadie and Sam are people who love video games and so become friends who make video games together. Zevin captures the messy and petty parts of being alongside humans for any length of time as well as that thrilling focus beyond yourself that comes when you join together. Sadie and Sam often interpret periods of their lives differently, assuming the other knows what's going on with them and feeling resentful by subsequent actions—a very human centering of ourselves. But there's also real care between them and figuring out how to show up for each other in their own ways. It's not feel-good, but it is rewarding.

3. As a time-traveling story, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley takes a very thoughtful and fresh approach. The story revolves around a handful of "expats" from various time periods who the British government brings in to study how they adjust to time travel. The expats are each assigned a "bridge," who helps ease their way. Our protagonist is the bridge for a Victorian arctic explorer, pulled from an expedition before he would have starved to death. Each of the characters are well written with distinct dialogue, and the expats' reactions to elements of modern life and the love story that develops, full of cross-cultural challenges, felt original. When the trust between two characters is ruptured, one character realizes they've read the other "as empire" and the other has read the protagonist as "nonconformist," each thinking they were on the same page but really seeing what they wanted to see, which is what they valued in themselves. The shock when they see each other anew felt very true. I wish the story went on a little longer, but the book overall was such a pleasure. It has the perfect last line, which I won't spoil.

4. In Memory of James Wright, Whose Poem I Ate by Tyler Cain Lacy is a novella told from the perspective of a swaybacked horse in Minnesota who ate one of Wright's poems, leaving us with a new poem of only a title and a blank page. David, the horse, has complaints—about the poem's reception and Wright's slowness in understanding the horse's lessons on writing and the very human interpretation generally assigned to the poem—as well as ideas of why the poem "works," what matters in poetry, and how rapture may be found. It's a clever folding in of both a close reading and ars poetica in a story, as well as being funny—every time the story leans more deeply into criticism, you're suddenly reminded this is coming from a horse, and a grumpy one at that. I would take a class with David the horse.

"[the poem] suggests that rapture is random and leads to nowhere but right back here. And this isn't a depressing conclusion nor a throwing-up of hands in defeat, but a liberating awareness that in the well-worn paths of our quotidian ambling, in our passive lapping at the algae-streaked trough, lay the meaning of our galloping lives."

5. I really delighted in Mathematics for Ladies by Jessy Randall, especially as I've been reading more science for work. Randall's persona poems highlight women scientists whose contributions have been overlooked or buried. The poems are funny and clever and distilled from a lot of reading and thinking about each scientist and the obstacles to her work. In the back of the book, a few of the scientists' stories are further detailed, but I don't think it hinders the reading experience not to know everyone's story; the women's passion for their subject matter and their perseverance in their discipline shine through. It is a book that leads to further rabbit holes.

6. Opening up Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss felt a little like coming home after reading much less poetry this year. It was easy to fall into the rhythms and play and leaps of her work. "The grooves were dug deep," Diane writes, about where we come from. Her newest collection is very much a love song to poetry: the love of it, the companionship of it, the boredom of it, the evolution of it. In long poems that end in satisfying callbacks and call to be read aloud, which I often did, my dog an indifferent audience, she wanders through memories, anger and hardship, practicality and wonder in an acceptance of what life is, the good and bad and hope of it. "Still, I'm copious," she writes about what can be taken, "and so are you."

7. Sarahland by Sam Cohen is weird and wild in the best ways possible. Each story in this collection is about a Sarah. I loved "Gossip," about the rise and fall of a brief relationship as interpreted by surrounding friends; "The First Sarah," which retells the story of Abraham and Sari, with Sari as a trans women; and "Becoming Trees," in which a couple decides they've explored their humanness enough and begin their preparations for becoming trees. There are a lot of funny lines and over-the-top situations grounded in some very big heart, and I couldn't put it down.

"There just aren't as many options for how to be human as people think."

8. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel has a really interesting premise, taking place over the course of a two-day youth women's boxing match. Each chapter narrates one of the match's brackets and how the two teens come together not just with their fists but their whole selves, past and future, worldviews and personalities. Bullwinkel merges so well a present moment, staying with the circling of an opponent, and the larger picture of what brought someone to this moment and how it might define them in one way or another. Whether the match is a big deal to them or not, going through it adds a layer to their emerging self, shaped by how the teen integrates this moment into her larger story. It was an engrossing read with some great moments of prose throughout.

9. North Woods by Daniel Mason I knew would be nature-focused, but I did not expect it to be a ghost story! The book follows the history of a tract of land in New England and a couple fleeing the Puritans who build on it, and then the generations of people passing through the house, while the land and house change. The various stories are funny, moving, and bumbling, but all are immersed in the flora and fauna of the place.

What I loved about the book were the many moments where the history of a previous character was about to be unearthed in some way, and then something happened to hinder that: redecoration or death, the words getting lost in translation or reinterpreted. It shows how fragile, perhaps, but also mysterious history is and the many stories that aren't documented and so don't get told. Still, for the reader outside this world, Mason drops little callbacks throughout, a character encountering the same mossy stone or hearing words that someone else spoke into the earth that shows just how much we are influenced by the past, even without realizing it. A book club friend noted that in this way the book is also instructing on how to read a landscape, rewarding close attention with small variations and patterns, essential for us in understanding an environment and conserving it, and I loved that.

10. Though I've read individual pieces by Lydia Davis over the years, can't and won't was the first short story collection of hers that I've read in full. And it was riveting, focused as she is on the minutiae of the every day, of how an object or person "is taking action in its own little way." Rather than telling us a story of ambitions, desire, and change, she tells us the story of the moments that don't seem to matter, as in what happens during the act of walking: "But I am told that I must pause at each step, letting my foot rest on the ground for a moment, if I want to develop its full power and reach, before taking the next." Exactly my cup of tea. I loved it.

As a reader, I think of myself as slow to turn toward fiction, but this year started off with stunning story after stunning story, thanks to writers like Emily St. John Mandel, Rivka Galchen, Amal El-Mohtar, and Max Gladstone. Miriam Toews' Fight Night made me weep on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow; Josephine Tey's mysteries made me chuckle from Glasgow to Edinburgh. I wandered slowly but steadily with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell throughout the year and I read Timothy Moore's short stories in one sitting and then started them over the next week. Grateful for these writers who move me in so many ways, and of course I have some poetry and nonfiction favorites!

1. Timothy Moore's exciting debut short story collection, I Will Teach You Retribution, is perfection. Its humor and absurdism and poignancy remind me a bit of George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), a bit of Aoka Matsuda (Where the Wild Ladies Are), and excitingly and obviously of Tim. If you aren't moved by the plight of a people-eating giant's quest for justice against himself, or a side character/ex-lover's desire to have her own transformative character arc, or a girl's use of social media to be popular, even though dead—or at least by the empathetic way Tim writes these characters and the wonderful crafting of his sentences—your heart may have stopped. An unexpected love-at-first-paragraph. Ten out of ten best use of exclamation points.

2. In Scared Violent Like Horses, John McCarthy writes about childhood in rural Illinois, absent parents, fistfights with friends, and flyover states, but mostly he writes of people in a way that sees their empathy and value. I read this while feeling a little lost and heartsick, and these poems wrapped around me and reminded me of what I love best. This is not to say that I saw my journey reflected back at me, but that lyric can offer the comfort of a song, that poetry lets you sit in a space of experience not answers, and that you can endure so much hardship and still emerge with tenderness. John’s writing is thoughtful and vivid, graceful and grace-giving. “But I’m not sure why we would expect dreams to make sense, when our waking lives so often fail to observe narrative convention,” he writes. And later: “No place is sad if you stay long enough.”

3. How to Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an abundantly written book, composed of letters between Red and Blue, two agents on opposite sides of a time war, one side more organic and one more tech-driven. It’s surprising and inventive in its world building and sweet on the act of letter writing. A love story that gushes to the beloved, overflowing without feeling cheesy. I read this on a beach in Mexico, against the bluest backdrop with the reddest sunrises.

“I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.”

4. Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was satisfying and unexpected, even up to the last line. As in her other books, she weaves together stories of multiple characters, gently nudging them more and more into each other’s orbits as the book draws to a close. This book feels higher stakes or maybe has more imaginary elements than The Glass Hotel, which I thought was nice but forgettable—I prefer the bigger “what ifs” in my fiction. But her writing always feels like a gliding, with these lovely details that linger. Here, there's an untouched forest in Canada and a shabby moon colony with a river reflecting the darkness of space. A writer of post-apocalyptic fiction, now a mother and turned off her own ideas. (It’s interesting to hear from an author who wrote a wildly successful novel about a global pandemic, then lived through one, and wrote a second pandemic-related novel in which much happens very differently.) The question of simulation a backdrop, the difference between knowing something in the abstract and the experience of it, how we come to the knowledge we have and the gestures we know we must make. All of it so well done and a pleasure to read.

5. The overarching frame of On Dreams by Maureen Thorson is the author's diagnosis of a rare eye disease that causes blind spots and some of Aristotle's absurd theories, such as how a mirror turns red when a menstruating woman looks into it. From there, in essays composed of short, aphoristic lines, Thorson explores what is reality and truth, how we know what we know, the illusion we have of control, and why we turn to writing and narrative. It's funny and smart, weaving in notes from her broad reading, and poignant in the leaps and turns it takes from line to line.

6. Border Vista by Anni Liu is composed of these lovely memory poems—atmospheric. She writes about emigrating to the US while young and being separated from her dad and grandparents with uncertain status, about relationships and home and dreaming in her nonnative language. The poems read almost memoir-like, back to back. The settings simple: a walk in the woods or market, hearing a piece of news or sitting in a movie theater, with some startling insight dropped upon the reader, the reader unaware even that she was building toward something. The lines below have echoed in my head the whole year, naming a longing so ingrained I didn't even know it was there:

“Crossing a deer-shaped patch of earth, I come back to the edge of an ancient sadness of being just one thing”

7. I really enjoyed diving into the oeuvre of Josephine Tey this year, and in particular I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like her Daughter of Time, a unique take on both the histories and mysteries genres. Her Inspector Grant, laid up in a hospital and bored, takes on an academic investigation of the slander against Richard III, infamous for killing his two nephews—the Princes in the Tower—to remove any rivals to the throne. Despite the fact that Grant is initially driven into this mystery because Richard’s face just "looks" more like a judge’s than a criminal’s (classic Tey ridiculousness), Tey makes a compelling case for his innocence. Grant and his “looker-upper” (researcher) friend take a policeman’s approach to the unresolved mystery, looking at the whereabouts and motivations of the people involved instead of what they say, and keeping an eye out for any breaks in the patterns that suggest foul play. For a book whose main action is two men talking about historical accounts, it’s surprisingly gripping and convincing (although my own knowledge of British history is spottier than a spotted dick pudding!).

"Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring."

8. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen is a book that “wants to believe it’s always possible / to love bigger & madder” and a poet whose “job is to trick adults / into knowing they have / hearts.” There's so much unbounded joy in these poems, even when writing of the sadness of having sadness or of the painful rejection by his mom for being gay or by fellow Americans for being Chinese. He writes rooted in a strong sense of self, which means his poems overflow with brightness, humor, and triumph.

Some possibilities:

“I want to be the Anti-Sisyphus, in love / with repetition, in love, in love. Foolish repetition, / wise repetition. I want more hours. I want insomnia, I want / to replace the clock tick with tambourines.”

“I am … an elegy that has felt light, the early morning light falling / on your lovely someone’s / lovable bare feet as he walks across the wood floor to sit by the window”

“Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, // & continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names.”

9. Serendipitously, I read Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch just after reading Maria Popova’s marvelous storytelling about Johannes Kepler’s defense of his mother’s witch trial in Figuring. It’s a fascinating story in that Kepler felt responsible for fueling the accusations against her due to an allegorical sci-fi story he wrote about moon people holding onto outdated beliefs despite evidence otherwise, and—small detail—the narrator got to the moon thanks to his magical mother. Kepler eventually cleared his mother’s name of charges and spent years annotating his own manuscript so that no one could misunderstand his intentions again.

Rivka’s book is a fictional telling more focused on the accused, Katherine Kepler, and reminded me of the narrative style of Miriam Toews' Woman Talking with a literate third party roped in to make a record and with the reader being told about the events conversationally vs. reading them. Around the same time, I watched the movie The Wonder (which has some tough tw content but was excellently done) which also resonates in theme, about the stories we believe and shape our lives around, and how the efficacy of religion and science is all wrapped up in story.

This was an excellent story based on fascinating history, and Rivka’s writing is both dryly funny (“A hummingbird once rested near my shoulder. It was a very ill omen. For one who isn't a flower.”) and thoughtful (“I had to say what was in my heart, which is knowledge.”).

10. I really enjoyed This Party's Dead, in which British journalist Erica Buist, to cope with her grief at the loss of her father-in-law-to-be, travels to seven death festivals around the world to learn how people in other cultures grieve.

“Whenever anyone suggests the dead are in attendance, gifts and sugar always seems to follow.”

The journey's question broadens from "how do we grapple with the reality of mortality" to the more meaningful exploration of "in what ways do we continue to have a relationship with 'our dead'"? Because we do have one, even if our culture doesn't know what to do with that relationship or provide us with outlets for remembering in community. (There's a lovely line in which someone refers to their ancestors as "my" dead.)

Some of the festivals she visits involve meals in graveyards, others take place when it's time to bury a body--sometimes months or even years after a death, and others involve exhuming bodies so that living family members can rewrap them or visit quite literally with their bones before reburying. As part of a western tradition that sees very little of and so fears dead bodies, Erica asks celebrants how they feel about the corpse of their loved one. She often assumes incorrectly a reason why something is done (perfume over the body not to hide the smell of decay for us but to show the loved one they are still cared for) and observes: “Time and again, I see fear [as a cause for a ritual] where there is only love.”

It's a moving book, written with humor and openness, and I'm very drawn to the rituals of communally remembering our dead. I wish we had something like this beyond a funeral to help us transition from having a living loved one to a dead loved one: a reason to come together often with food and sharing and to invite our dead back home, even if for a little while.

As one festival celebrant tells her, “We think about dead people all the time. We pray for all the ancestors, even the ones we don’t remember; we have a huge celebration for them every six months. They’re not lost.”

SOLITI 2023: THE END OF YEAR LISTS

Paltsa-Kai Salama (Pink Chameleons, Black Lizard)

This has been A good music year. I have heard so much inspiring music/albums. Here’s some good stuff/songs/albums I’ve been into this year

Barrio Colette: Filles Garçons  – Super great new french (?) garage pop song!

Mothers Of Invention: We Are Only In it For The Money – Great tunes and vibe. There’s also a cool version of this with digital drums overdubbed in THE 80s (album was released originally in 1968).

Captain Beefheart: Safe As Milk – Raw and gritty garage blues.

Bill Frisell: Disfarmer – Beautiful instrumental country music.

Phish: Clifford Ball 1996 live album- Funny, musical and inspiring.

Wallice: Off The Rails EP – Strokes/Weezer melodies done by young LA singer.

Hound Dog Taylor And The Houserockers – Raw! Just raw and great.

I read more books this year than I ever have since I started documenting my reading in 2009. The continued ups and downs of the pandemic made books a grateful escape, but having read so much—and a lot of it “reading lite”—there’s much that blurs together and fades quickly. However, I was excited to come across Katherine Addison and Nghi Vo, whose stories thrilled me to my toes. I read Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie in January and his images have haunted me throughout the year. I read very few poetry books in 2021, and yet they’re the words that most take up residence in my mind and heart. And The Hidden Life of Trees kept me company on my frequent walks among the trees of my neighborhood. Here are a few more books that clung to my restless mind this year:

1. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben portrays trees so personably, talking in terms of how they parent and educate, passing on knowledge or learning from a summer of drought. How beeches are somewhat the bullies of the forest as they grow around and through the crowns of other trees. How trees that are sleep deprived—either nightly or seasonally—don't live long. How the roots of a particular old quaking aspen have sprouted thousands of offshoots in its time. How trees are social, communicating threats to each other via scents and taking care of their wounded by sharing nutrients via their roots. How walking under some stands of trees can lower your blood pressure and increase lung capacity. How tree species migrated south and then back north after the Ice Age. How trees with year round red leaves are rather inefficient and would have died out had humans not thought them so pretty and continued cultivating them. How the whole life cycle of a tree's life is important to a forest, which we often don't allow for, and other fascinating facts that makes this book such a pleasure to spend time with.

2. Hotel Almighty is such an exquisite book that immediately upon finishing I went and ordered three more copies to gift to friends! Sarah J. Sloat erasures and adds collage to pages from Stephen King's Misery. Each page is rendered so differently. I gasped aloud several times. There are surprising and beautiful lines such as “lay back in the urgency of work” and "burning seemed the proper thing, like research for a great drama." This book is a pleasure.

3. In Nghi Vo’s novella When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, a story collector is trapped by three tiger sisters and must wait through the night for help to come, so the story collector tells the sisters a folk story of a tiger and scholar. However, the tigers have the same tale in their folklore, and frequently interrupt to tell it from their perspective. It's a beautiful questioning of who gets to tell a story and how the story is shaped by who’s telling it. Doesn’t hurt that that the folktale also centers a poem, which I will always cheer on.

4. A lot of poetry books are quiet with a kind of quiet that works its way in, slows you, attunes you, shifts you, and I like that kind of poetry, I do. But then there's Homie by Danez Smith, which is loud and spilling off the page and calling to you from across the street and even while there are a lot of heavy topics that they address—of losing a friend to suicide, of not being able to come out fully to their family, of trying to survive and thrive in a white supremacist and straight world—at its core, it is a book of joy that revels in and reveres friendship, and god, I love friendship and I love people writing about their friends and I love when love feels loose and uncontainable and the largest part of the sky and I think this book might bring you joy, too. "a thousand years of daughters, then me. what else could I have learned to be?"

5. I was surprised at how compelling I found Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, which has a premise I glossed over and not much plot to speak of. But I couldn’t put it down! A forgotten half goblin/half elf in the middle of nowhere suddenly finds himself in line for the throne and moves to the elven court to begin his rule. It’s not as high fantasy as it sounds as it’s more about the intricacies and politics of being at a royal court than in a fantastical land. And it’s not even as Games of Thrones-ish as it sounds because the new king, Maia, whose journey we follow, is so earnest in his desire to rule kindly and give respect to those who serve him—to the continued astonishment of those around him. He’s good, but with all the relatable insecurities about managing others while being true to oneself. There are several attempts to dethrone Maia, yet there isn’t a strong plot driving the book. It’s mostly about Maia learning the ropes in an oppressive/traditional society while trying to change it and tenuously building friendships even though he’s repeatedly told that kings can’t be friends with those below him—meaning anyone. Ugh. You just want him to find a friend!

6. Meghan Privitello’s Notes on the End of the World doesn't look like any specific apocalypse. At the end of the world time crumbles, carnivals never leave town, earthquakes hit, animals are where they don't belong, and "every barn has become a church / to worship storms in." But each day's note captures some moment of bravery or loneliness, regret or determination or sanity that speaks to even small world-falling-apart experiences. Privitello asks: "with minutes until disaster / what do you gather? How do you / navigate your own useless fear?” And later: “Somehow we’ve all been given the same fate, / which means our lives are ordinary.”

7. By Bus by Erica Van Horn is a little travelogue documenting the conversations you don't want to hear as the author commutes by bus through the small towns of Ireland. So much happens on a bus: shoes are polished and a woman looks for a husband and a mother is forgotten in the last town. A near disaster with a red Ford Fiesta creates an unexpected kinship among the passengers, and tourists on one side of the bus take pictures of sheep while the other side focuses on a castle. There are lots of missed connections and lateness (never earliness) and scathing criticism for passengers who don't say thank you when they leave. It's a very charming book about people being people that almost (almost!) has me thinking fondly of my daily train commute before the pandemic. 

8. Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino is so playful and witchy! I feel in awe of the energy in Kiki’s poems, her unapologetic way of writing and being herself, the human mix of everything good, messy, and hard. And it’s clear that she takes pleasure in words—through her forms such as sestinas and villanelles as well her prose and other pieces—a pleasure so swiftly passed on to the reader.

9. Night Talks by Elisabeth Rynell, translated from Swedish by Rika Lesser, is a raw expression of grief / a long poem and lament written upon the sudden death of Rynell’s husband. It’s beautiful and hard. Most of it is poetry, but she bookends it with a moving interview with her sleepless self at night and with stills of memories. // I began reading poetry when in need of words I couldn’t find myself, and I am always grateful for those who commit to paper their thoughts in the midst of pain. It makes some books strange to recommend, but they are there for when you need them.

1. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay is written (and cannot help to be read) in a spirit of pure joy. Each entry is a few paragraphs on something he delighted in for the day—from a hyphen ("the handshake of the punctuation world") to the concept of do-overs in games ("it delighted me in part because among the sorrows of adulthood, this action can feel more fantasy than possibility"). Watching someone look at the world in wonder and in gratitude changes you, softens you.

2. Naamah by Sarah Blake is a strange and gorgeous book I can't stop thinking about! Sarah retells the story of Noah's flood in an exciting and inventive way (an impressive feat if you're someone who's heard the biblical story countless times) that includes lots of dreams, a cockatoo guide, a tiger who is seen and not seen, and desire in many forms. It is surreal and real and poetry. It's that kind of story that I wish I had the chops to write, but since that would take me years, I'm so glad Sarah wrote it and that it's here now in this very present moment to read.

(And bonus! Reading this book made me return to her earlier collections of poetry: Mr. West, which follows Kanye West and his work, and Let's Not Live on Earth, which includes a beautiful series of monster poems. 2019 was the year I became a huge fan of Sarah’s work.)

3. I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On by Khadijah Queen, which came out a few years ago from YesYes Books, is an inventive, energy-giving collection of prose poems. Khadijah’s speaker runs into Prince, Nelson Mandela, Elton John, The Rock, and others in both mundane and strange circumstances—on a video shoot or at the mall or at a bus stop or on MySpace. Some encounters are simply documented, others show the subtle or overt microaggressions women, and particularly Black women, face, and others revel in the joy of being, of talking back or just talking. 

4. Much has been written about Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, and all the praise is true. Her story weaves together the AIDs epidemic in the Chicago gay community in the 1980s and the present-day story of a woman connecting with an enstranged daughter and dealing with her memories of those who passed away. It’s a time that I’ve heard so little about and Makkai recreates the confusion, fear, and anger that many people felt as well as creates vibrant and real characters whom you also grieve to lose.

5. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister made me angry in the best ways possible, but also gave me words for my anger (ah, yes! that’s what I've been sensing). She provides a solid background on the history of women's movements over the decades, in particular centering women of color's leadership in these movements. It's good to know where we came from!

“The task—especially for the newly awakened, the newly angry, especially for the white women, for whom incentives to renounce their rage will be highest in coming years—is to keep going, to not turn back, to not give in to the easier path, the one where we weren’t angry all the time, where we accepted the comforts of racial and economic advantages that will always be on offer to those who don’t challenge power. Our job is to stay angry . . . perhaps for a very long time.”

6. I picked up Exhalation, Ted Chiang’s latest short story collection, because I loved the 2016 movie Arrival, based on one of his stories. Exhalation surprised me—it was so different from what I usually read. Chiang’s work is very heady, his stories concept-based rather than plot or character based, and often focus around a scientific or mathematical fact. Though I didn’t connect with every story, his writing expanded my thinking, made me pay attention to the logic within the world—and I loved that he included notes at the end of of each story about his inspiration, which made me appreciate each one.

7-8. Orange World by Karen Russell and Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin are two very strange and delightful short story collections that remind me why I love this genre and how far writers can take us into the surreal and parrallel-to-the-real and still have us follow them. After being somewhat disappointed with Karen’s first novel, I was eager to read her return to the short story world. Months later I still carry around with me the eerily calm rowing of the “The Gondoliers,” a story about sisters who have developed echolocation to guide tourists through a post-apocalyptic polluted and flooded Florida. Mouthful of Birds by the Spanish writer Samanta Schweblin had a similar tone to Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. I loved it from the first story “Headlights,” in which a growing collection of women left at a gas station by their new husbands together take back the wheel of a car and leave. These stories haunt and surprise and tingle your spine.

9. I read very few poetry collections this year (and I miss it…), but one I did read was Amy Lipman’s chapbook collection, Cardinal Directions, published by Ghost Proposal last spring. Amy’s voice is like chamomile tea, immediately calming and guiding my attention to the smallest details of home and solitude and what it is to be. Always with a note of humor (”I remember you like a pet”), Amy’s self-interrogation is honest and unexpected, her form direct and playful. This book calls me to myself.

grass adjusting     itself after      someone’s total weight or just one step

trying more     throughout the day     only to listen

I make arrangements     to understand     one part of the task before getting to the next     spreading oil in the pan     and witnessing it warm,      asking myself

to stop

making

language

10. How do you recommend a difficult and heartbreaking book? The Undying is not for the well or intact but, as Anne Boyer writes, for those who once were sick or will be sick. Her book explores her journey through breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, through disability and exhaustion, through capitalistic-oriented healthcare, through the difficulties of living without state-recognized families, through the pain and body as history. Boyer weaves in and out of story, the (lack of) literature of illness, and the ways in which capitalism is tied up with acts of care. As someone who’s lost a loved one to cancer, it’s difficult to read, but necessary, too, to have stories of not alone-ness and stories that could beget change. Boyer has so many insights into how we respond to and are failed by healthcare and our culture’s attitude toward the sick, our often blind belief in surgeons and medicine to save us, the myth that cancer is one identifiable disease and not a metaphor, and the inevitability that medicine becomes “the safest opportunity for profit.”

Whores - Gold  Haken - Affinity Snow Burial - Victory in Ruin Opeth - Sorceress Faces of the Bog - Ego Death Darkthrone - Arctic Thunder Dissona - Paleopneumatic Hung on Horns - Slaves Khemmis - Hunted Meshuggah - The Violent Sleep of Reason Norma Jean - Polar Similar Car Bomb - Meta  Gojira - Magma Dillinger Escape Plan - Dissociation Metallica - Hardwired… to Self Destruct

Honorable Mention Ghost - Popestar  High Priest - Consecration  Huntsmen - The Colonel  Pallbearer - Fear and Fury  Sons of Ra - Anthropology  Pale Horseman/Mound Builders Split