In the best of times, I find reading a chore, possibly because my brain wasn’t built to give attention to a page full of small, immobile characters. This space isn’t the venue to delve into the science that links intergenerational, in utero, or early childhood stress to attention span. You’ll simply have to trust me; the peer-reviewed literature exists, and if I were able to focus for long enough, I would read and summarize it for you.
In the worst of times, my desire and responsibility to read also compete with the Internet, the siege of Gaza, the water crises in Jackson and Flint, and the rise of Elon Musk. What’s the point of reading, after all, if we’re careening toward doom? But that’s life. One does all manner of things between cradle and grave to pass the time, to improve oneself, or to better the lot of those around them. I read to be a better writer and hopefully a better human.
This year’s path to enlightenment and collective liberation included, but was not limited to:
Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t a Rapist by Cecilia Gentili, an epistolary memoir by someone who looked their trauma square in the eye and said, you won first, but I won last. If you’ve ever wondered what moving forward while repairing the past looks like, this beautiful account is it. With the confidence of a performer who knows what her audience needs and of an empath who can read (and READ) a room, Gentili manages to be both searing and generous. There wasn’t a moment when I wanted to set this book down, and I can’t imagine ever forgetting this life.
I learned of Natalia Ginzburg only a few years ago—poor me—but in this short period of time, I have become a lifelong member of her fan club. The two novellas that constitute The Road to the City are acerbic and well-tuned takedowns of patriarchy, not only the limitations it imposes, but the damages it leaves in its wake. Ginzburg layers fancy and whim over austerity and suffocation. Her protagonists know they deserve more than society allows, an awareness that compounds the tragedy and ratchets up the wryness. While reading this book, I thought of Sinead O’Connor, a protagonist of this life who seemed ahead of her time, righteous in the face of misogyny, imperialism, and the faux feminism of her contemporaries.
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid was another gem from one of our greatest writers. Kincaid imbues her young Annie with the naiveté one expects of a child but also with an astute eye for the world around and inside of her. This is a book about detachment, full of insightful and heartbreaking moments where the protagonist realizes she’s too old for this and too smart for that. There’s no return.
I don’t know if life is replete with serendipity or if we simply make do with what we got. In January, I wrote a novel I’ve spent the better part of this year editing. The structure is a departure from my previous writing, and I’ve been lazily looking for confirmation, if not inspiration, in the work of others. Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe and Blackouts by Justin Torres were two such books, queer not only in their content but in their structures. Sharpe and Torres bring a fractured past into the present and manage, in the process, to reframe histories the powers-that-be would sooner have us forget. “[I]t occurs to me that people must actively and continually allow [“Amazing Grace”] to escape its genesis in order to offer it such circumstances: the murder of six Black women and three Black men in Mother Emanuel AME,” writes Sharpe about the dodgy origins of the iconic song that Obama wrongfootedly sang at Rev. Pinckney’s funeral. Sharpe’s observation applies to much of U.S. history and suggests a perpetual, foundational, and willful ignorance. These are books of reckoning.
I found honest interrogation of self and of kin in Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, an expert at weaving together the personal and political. She, however, might argue the weaving is intrinsic to the human experience under capitalism and that she’s merely pulling apart the strands one at a time. In any case, it is an expert disentangling, with an assured voice that gives meticulous, spare sentences the illusion of stream-of-consciousness.
I’d mistakenly believed Damon Galgut was Scottish and might therefore write with an anticolonial pen, which is why I picked up In a Strange Room. Wrong, sadly. The narrator of this literary triptych is a South African who travels aimlessly through Europe, Africa, and Asia, by turns motivated by obsession, adventure, or a sense of responsibility. His drab existence seems to be on the hunt for meaning. The writing is often inventive and suspenseful. I had trouble putting it down, but I also had trouble reconciling the feeling I was abetting something, the type of narrative where a white man traipses through the global South, reducing the countries and its citizens to wallpaper. In some ways, the opposite of this book is Language City, Ross Perlin’s forthcoming chronicle of New York’s linguistic underpinnings. This astounding compendium of the hundreds of languages that constitute one city is equal parts history book, detective novel, and primer for how to live in a multicultural society. The intelligence and humanity on every single page is inspired.
This was the year in which I committed to reading more poetry, a medium, I have often found beguiling, primarily because it induces envy: To do more with less is the ethos of the oppressed, and I just cannot do it! Lucky for us, others can. Chrome Valley, penned by the inimitable Mahogany Browne, reads like a turbulent off-roading adventure, one in which you’re wearing a helmet, strapped in tightly, and sitting snugly on comfortable cushions. Browne’s collection is an exploration of absolutely everything—death, feet, skating rinks, siblings and grandaunts, and of course, love. Mohammed El-Kurd’s blazing debut, Rifka, reminded me that time passes, the contexts shift, but the oppressors are the same in their ignorance and fear. “If you ask me where I’m from it’s not a one-word answer,” El-Kurd writes. “Be prepared seated, sober, geared up. If hearing about a world other than yours makes you uncomfortable, drink the sea, cut off your ears, blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense.” Any questions?
I’ve run out of space and time, but I want to acknowledge the madcap fun of Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Candelaria; the wicked sentences and structure of Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas (tr. Jennifer Croft); the examination of settler colonialism’s ongoing traumas in Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls; the analysis of capitalism’s devouring, regurgitating, and repackaging of liberatory ideas in Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture; the tenderness and lush imagery that bleeds off the page in Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat; the humor, warmth, and righteous ice of Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency; the genius wordsmithing and piercing honesty of Brontez Purnell’s Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt; the cheek and ingenuity of Open Throat by Henry Hoke; the indefatigable erudition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (tr. William Weaver); the gripping storytelling of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima; the vulnerability and labor of Heartbreak by Florence Williams; and the epic economy of A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux (tr. Tanya Leslie).
Currently reading: None but the Righteous by Chantal James and Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.
For the easily distracted brain so readily fueled by fleeting accomplishments, a note of gratitude for small chapters.
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